Employee Tax slips: T4, Relevé 1, etc.

Overview

Each year, employees must declare their earnings and pay their taxes.

To do so, they receive government prescribed forms – T4, T4A, Relevé-1, etc. – from their employers with their earnings of the year before.

Employees must file their taxes by April 30 of each year. Two months before – by the last day of February – you (their employer) must send them T4s (etc.) with a summary of their earnings, which they will use to calculate their taxes.
You send T4 forms to your employees, in paper or PDF format. At the same time you need to send the same information to the government in .XML format files. The government matches them and validates what the employees submit.

This topic is all about producing and submitting those forms.

Common forms

The most common forms you will need to produce are:

T4 forms – Federal Employment Income statement
Relevé-1 (RL1)forms – for Quebec employees (Equivalent of T4 for Quebec provincial tax)

Other forms you might need to produce include

T4A forms – Federal Pension, Retirement, Annuity, or Other Income
Relevé-2 (RL2) forms – Quebec Retirement and Annuity income

Configuring the forms

Each form consists of a set of boxes.

Umana has a reference table for each form, with an entry for each box on the form (plus some hidden entries) The entry defines what goes in the box. See T4 table as an example.

This is basically a one-time job. Your first year you need to configure these boxes, which typically don't change much from year to year. But you still need to check each of them to make sure they are right.

Year 2020 with Covid was a exception. It had many changes.
Adding new pay codes may affect your T4 configuration
The T4 and Relevé-1 forms are standard. We can help you set up those and others.

Producing the employee forms

The objective is to produce and distribute a T4 (etc.) form for each employee who needs one.

There are basically 3 main steps

Import employee adjustments or corrections as required. For example, you might have a separate program that calculates Box 52, the pension adjustment, which you subsequently import into Umana.
Balance and check: Print control reports and balance the various T4 (etc) boxes against your pay register and other reports.

Here is a more complete check-list.
Produce and distribute individual employee T4s (etc) forms to employees. The tax slips can be distributed in 4 ways:
1. Print and distribute the paper tax slips
2. Use the ESS (ESS - Net pay reports) to make the tax slips available for the employees to retrieve themselves. This option is accessed by the employees by going to the Top menu bar> Print > ESS and then selecting the document they wish to access.
3. Use the Portal to give the employees access to their tax slips.
4. Email directly to the employees using the EMAIL option in Destination when producing the tax slip.

Transmitting to the government

T4 data, Releve-1, (etc) data is transmitted to the government in an .XML file format. (You do not actually send the T4 slips at all.)

Umana has created exports which take the information for all employees for each form, and creates the .XML for you.

At the federal level, different EMPRNOs represent different CRA accounts. Each XML file must be for a single EMPRNO.

Summary reports

Depending on your province and industry, you may have various summary reports to produce as well as the T4 summaries.
Quebec has a Relevé-1 summary, CNESST and WSDRF that employers must produce.
Other provinces may have WCB or WSIB reports to produce.