Official CSES Taxes Statement.pdf - Google Drive

Dear Members of CSES, As some of you may be aware CSES has recently encountered significant issues with the CRA and our accounting practices. In past years CSES has not been able to contact the CRA directly due to our annual turnover of executives. As a result, the CRA began to assume values based on the income we received from student fees on an annual basis. Since we are a not for profit organization we should be entirely exempt from taxes, with the exception of certain Leo’s sales which total in the low hundreds. However, since we could not communicate this to the CRA the value they assumed snowballed over several years. On December 17th, the CRA accessed the primary CSES bank account and withdrew approximately $96000 in taxes, fines and late fees. The executive would like to apologize for the gross mishandling of your money. Furthermore, we would like to reassure the membership that we are taking every possible measure to mitigate the fine that was imposed. We are actively meeting with our accounting firm, Welch LLP Ltd, to discuss our options and determine how much of this fine we can have reimbursed. The firm stated that we may be able to recoup a portion of this sum. We are also approaching several of our partners, including the faculty, in an effort to receive guidance on how to proceed with this matter. We will continue to give this issue our full attention until we reach an appropriate resolution. We will continue to update you on our progress as the situation develops, we are strongly committed to keeping this matter as transparent as possible. We will be having two special meetings with the next few weeks to provide further information on this situation, more details will be shared in the near future. We encourage you to attend and ask any questions that you may have to help clarify any confusion regarding this matter. Regards, The CSES Team