Canadian Income Tax

Use

This Haskell package consists of a library and executable to fill out the Canadian T1 tax form. The way to use it is as follows:

1. Download the fillable PDF form from the canada.ca Web site.

2. Fill out the form; don't bother filling out any fields that are calculated from other fields in the same form, that part will be performed automatically.

3. Save the filled-out PDF form.

4. Run

   pdftk 5006-r-fill-22e.pdf generate_fdf output 5006-r-fill-22e.fdf
   

where 5006-r-fill-22e.pdf is the file you previously saved and 5006-r-fill-22e.pdf is the name of the output file; feel free to change them.

5. Run

   complete-canadian-t1-form 5006-r-fill-22e.fdf -o 5006-r-fill-22e-filled.fdf
   

where 5006-r-fill-22e-filled.fdf is the output FDF file name with all calculated fields automatically filled in.

6. Run

   pdftk 5006-r-fill-22e.pdf fill_form 5006-r-fill-22e-filled.fdf output 5006-r-fill-22e-filled.pdf
   

to transfer the FDF field values from the previous step to the new PDF file, 5006-r-fill-22e-filled.pdf.

7. Verify the final PDF file. The executable comes with no warranty and has not been approved by CRA. The reponsibility for its correctness is still yours.

8. Print and sign the tax return, then send it to CRA by mail along with your documents. At some point they'll hopefully open a way to digitally file the same information they accept on paper, but their EFILE protocol is so far not open to the public.

Installation

As you can see from the above instructions, you'll need to install the free pdftk executable to deal with PDF <-> FDF conversion. See their instructions. On Ubuntu you can simply run

sudo apt install pdftk

To install the complete-canadian-t1-form executable, you'll need Haskell development tools. The simplest procedure overall is to install ghcup, then use it to install ghc (version 9.2 or greater) and cabal, then to run

cabal install canadian-income-tax