The admin that eats a week rarely looks like admin while it is happening. It looks like four separate legal clocks, started on four different dates, that nobody is tracking in one place.
Key takeaways
The paperwork around a single closing does not run on one deadline. The Income Tax Act requires records to be kept “until the expiration of six years from the end of the last taxation year” they relate to (s.230(4)(b)). The Excise Tax Act imposes a parallel but separate six-year duty for GST/HST purposes, requiring records that let CRA verify your liabilities, retained “until the expiration of six years after the end of the year to which they relate” (ETA s.286(3)). Neither clock starts when a deal closes — both start at the end of a tax year, which means files from January and files from December of the same year come due on the same date despite eleven months between them. Layer FINTRAC and CASL obligations on top, each running their own separate windows below, and “keeping good records” stops being one habit and becomes four overlapping ones.
FINTRAC’s guidance on when to verify identity is precise about the trigger, and it is not the same for every counterparty. For an individual, “you must verify the identity of a person from whom you receive funds in any amount at the time the transaction takes place.” For a corporation or other entity, the same guidance gives you “within 30 days after the day on which the transaction is conducted.” The guidance also resolves a shared-file trap directly: where you receive funds from a client represented by a different real estate broker or sales representative, it is that other representative — the one holding the relationship with the person providing the funds — who bears the identification duty, not you. Knowing which of these applies before funds land, rather than after, is what keeps this from becoming a scramble at closing.
Writing “FINTRAC compliance” on a to-do list hides that it is actually five distinct record types with five distinct retention triggers. FINTRAC’s own guidance lays out: a copy of every report you submit, kept “for at least five years after the day it was submitted”; large cash transaction records, for cash of $10,000 or more, kept five years from the date the record was created; large virtual currency transaction records, on the same five-year-from-creation basis; receipt of funds records, required “when you receive funds in any amount” and covering the date, amount, method and counterparty details of the transaction; and information records on every person or entity you act for. Two records both carry a five-year rule, but one counts from when you submitted it and the other from when you created it — treating all five as a single undifferentiated “keep FINTRAC stuff for five years” habit is exactly the kind of admin shortcut that produces a gap during an actual examination.
CASL’s implied-consent rules mean a contact list is not a fixed asset; it decays on a schedule. Section 10 of the Act gives implied consent from a past purchase or inquiry, but only for a limited window: “the two-year period” after a purchase or transaction, or “the six-month period” after a bare inquiry (s.10(10)). That means every week that passes, some slice of a past-client list crosses out of implied consent and becomes ineligible for a commercial electronic message without further action — not because anything changed about the contact, but because the calendar moved. A list that is not reviewed on a recurring basis is not simply stale; a growing share of it becomes legally unmarketable to under CASL without anyone having decided that on purpose.
Once production is high enough to bring on help — a transaction coordinator, a part-time assistant — the admin does not stop at record-keeping; it adds a classification question that reopens every time the working relationship changes. For a contract formed anywhere outside Quebec, CRA’s current guidance runs a two-step test — what the parties intended, then whether the facts bear that out — weighing “the level of control the payer has over the worker’s activities,” “whether the worker or payer provides the tools and equipment,” “the degree of financial risk the worker takes” and “the worker’s opportunity for profit”, among other elements. Intention alone does not settle it, because “all of the facts, including the actual terms and conditions of employment, determine a worker’s employment status, not just the intention.” A written agreement calling someone a contractor is, as Treadstone Law puts it, “a relevant piece of evidence — but it isn’t determinative”, because “CRA and the courts look at the substance of the working relationship, not the label the parties chose.” An assistant who works exclusively for one agent, on that agent’s schedule, fully integrated into their day-to-day file work, is drifting toward employee status regardless of what the contract calls them — CRA lists a working relationship that “does not present a degree of continuity, loyalty, security, subordination, or integration” among the indicators pointing to a self-employed worker. If that is the real answer, the consequence is direct: the payer becomes responsible for withholding and remitting income tax, CPP and EI from that worker’s pay, a duty that does not go away just because both sides agreed to a different label at the outset.
In one ordinary week, an agent closes a file where the buyer paid a $12,000 deposit in cash — triggering a large cash transaction record with its own five-year-from-creation clock, separate from the file’s tax records. The same week, funds arrive from a numbered company on a different deal, giving the agent 30 days (not zero) to complete identity verification, versus the immediate trigger that would have applied had the payer been an individual. A quarterly CASL review turns up 40 contacts who crossed the two-year implied-consent mark since the last transaction-based touchpoint — they move to a re-permission campaign rather than the regular newsletter send. None of this is visible on a calendar as “compliance work” until it is tracked as its own recurring task, separate from the client-facing work that generated it in the first place.
Related: a starter kit for FINTRAC compliance, a client identification workflow guide, and how long FINTRAC records have to be kept.
None of them individually — the risk is treating them as one clock. ITA and ETA records both run six years from the end of the relevant tax year; FINTRAC’s five record categories each run five years from their own trigger date. A single transaction can carry three overlapping deadlines that do not start on the same day.
The representative who holds the relationship with the person actually providing the funds. FINTRAC’s guidance states this directly — if you receive funds from a client represented by a different broker or sales representative, it is that other representative who must identify them, not you.
No. It means the implied-consent window has closed for now, not that contact is banned. Express consent, which the CRTC confirms does not expire once given, reopens the relationship — the fix is asking, not deleting the contact.
A short call can help you see where these clocks can be tracked automatically instead of manually.
