With little to no publicity, the CRA has introduced another filing requirement for tax returns filed after April 8th, 2014 for the 2013 tax year and forward. If your business makes use of the internet in any way to earn income, you must fill in a special section of the T2125 business return or a Schedule 88 with your corporate tax return. The form requests information concerning up to 5 web sites you have a presence on and an estimate of how much of your gross revenue is derived from the internet presence.

What does "internet presence" mean? It covers:
  • you sell of goods and/or services on your own pages or websites. You may have a shopping chart and process payment transactions yourself or through a third party service;
  • your sites doesn't support transactions but your customers call, complete, and submit a form, or e-mail you to make a purchase, order, booking, and others;
  • you sell goods and/or services on auction, marketplace, or similar websites operated by others (e.g. Ebay, Kijiji, Craigslist, Ritchie Brothers) 
  • you earn income from advertising, income programs, or traffic your site generates. For example; through static ads placed on the company's website, or through advertising traffic programs such as Google AdSense or Microsoft Ad Centre
  • Profiles on other pages describing your business on blogs, auction, marketplace
One tax blogger interprets that last point to include something as innocuous as yellowpages.ca. However, it's important to keep in mind that there is little to no information regarding the nature of this requirement. It's so new, the form is not available in French at the time of this posting! Some professional software packages don't have it integrated yet into their design.

There is no specific legislation requiring this information. So, naturally we asked whether it is a request or a demand. The answer lies in between - it's a request ... at this point. But failing to submit this information could result in a failure to file information return penalty (up to $2,500)! As such, we recommend full disclosure of any web presence that your company may have.