Switching accountants is often treated as a hiring decision: find someone better, sign an engagement letter, done. For an incorporated contractor, the mechanics underneath that decision matter more than the decision itself. CRA needs to know who is authorized to speak for the corporation. The new accountant needs the actual records, not a summary of them. And someone needs to look at what the prior file did before deciding what, if anything, needs to be fixed.
Updating CRA and Revenu Québec Authorization
The corporation’s authorized representative on file with CRA does not change automatically when you stop using a prior accountant. The new accountant can request authorization through CRA’s Represent a Client service or certified tax software, and the business owner usually has to confirm that request in CRA My Business Account within 10 business days. The corporation can also authorize the new accountant directly in My Business Account using the representative’s RepID, GroupID, or registered business number. For situations where online access isn’t available, Form AUT-01 authorizes offline access by phone, mail, fax, or in person, but it does not provide online access.
Adding a new representative does not require cancelling the old one first. CRA access remains in place until the authorization is cancelled or expires, so in practice most contractors confirm the new authorization is active, then cancel the prior representative once the transition is complete. That avoids a gap in who can speak to CRA on the corporation’s behalf while still removing access that is no longer needed.
For Quebec-incorporated contractors or those filing a CO-17, Revenu Québec authorization is a separate process from CRA’s. A CRA authorization does not extend to Revenu Québec, and the two need to be updated independently. Form MR-69-V or the equivalent online service in My Account for businesses handles the Quebec authorization.
What Actually Needs to Move to the New File
A new accountant taking over a corporate file needs more than the most recent filed T2. The records that matter for continuity:
- prior-year T2, T1, and (where applicable) GST/HST, QST, and CO-17 returns, along with the corresponding notices of assessment
- the corporate minute book, including share structure, director resolutions, and any dividend declarations
- general ledger detail and trial balances, not just year-end financial statements
- Capital Cost Allowance schedules showing undepreciated capital cost (UCC) by class, so continuity carries forward correctly
- the shareholder loan continuity schedule showing the running balance and how prior draws, salary, and dividends have been applied against it
- RDTOH, GRIP, and any non-capital or net capital loss carryforward balances
- payroll account details and remittance history if the corporation runs payroll
Financial statements alone don’t carry this information. A new accountant working only from the prior year’s year-end statements has to reconstruct the CCA schedule, the shareholder loan history, and the corporate tax attribute balances from scratch, which adds cost and risk to the transition that a proper handover avoids.
The Professional Handover
The CPA Ontario Code of Professional Conduct sets expectations around professional behaviour, integrity, due care, competence, confidentiality, and obligations to clients and the public. In a handover, the practical distinction is between the corporation’s own records and the prior accountant’s internal working papers. Original source documents, filed returns, notices, minute book records, contracts, bank statements, and final financial statements are part of the client file the corporation needs for continuity. Internal working papers, review notes, and firm-created tax-preparation schedules are different: they may be shared, summarized, or used to answer successor questions, but they should not be described as automatically belonging to the client in the same way as original records.
Fee disputes can complicate whether a prior firm does extra handover work or releases firm-created schedules immediately. They should not be treated as permission to withhold the corporation’s own original source records. If a handover becomes tense, the request should separate client-owned records from working-paper requests so the transition does not stall over the wrong category of document.
Requesting the handover in writing, with a specific list of what’s needed rather than a general “please send my files” request, tends to produce a faster and more complete response. A new accountant experienced with contractor files will usually prepare that list as part of taking on the engagement.
Access That Doesn’t Transfer Automatically
Some access has to be re-granted rather than transferred:
- QuickBooks Online or Xero access. The company file itself belongs to the corporation, but user access, bank feed connections, and any app integrations need to be re-shared or reconnected under the new accountant’s login.
- CRA and Revenu Québec online authorization, as covered above.
- Return-specific filing authorization forms, such as T183, T183CORP, and Quebec equivalents where applicable. These are tied to the specific return being filed, not a standing grant that survives an accountant change.
- Payroll service provider access, if payroll is run through a third-party service rather than directly through QuickBooks or Xero.
None of this is complicated on its own, but missed access is the most common reason a transition drags out longer than expected. Confirming each item explicitly during the handover, rather than assuming it carries over, keeps the timeline predictable.
What a Prior-Year Review Looks For
Before taking on ongoing work, a new accountant reviewing an incorporated IT contractor’s file is typically checking for issues specific to the contractor space that a generalist practice may not have flagged:
- PSB risk exposure in how the corporation’s relationship with its client (or agency) has been structured and reported, and whether the file reflects any prior consideration of that risk
- GST/HST and QST registration and filing history, including whether ITCs and ITRs claimed are properly supported and whether the filing frequency matches the corporation’s revenue
- The shareholder loan account, whether it carries an unresolved debit balance and whether draws have been cleared through salary or dividends within the required timeframes
- CCA continuity, confirming the UCC balances by class reconcile to what was claimed in prior returns
- Payroll setup, if the corporation pays salary, including whether source deductions and remittances have been handled correctly
- T2 and T1 coordination, whether corporate compensation decisions and personal filings have been reflecting the same numbers
This review is not an audit of the prior accountant’s competence. It’s the standard due diligence a new firm does before taking responsibility for ongoing filings, the same review Teplov CPA performs as the first step described on the switching accountants overview.
Deciding Whether to Amend Anything
A prior-year review sometimes surfaces something that should be corrected: an unsupported ITC claim, a CCA class error, an unreported dividend, or a shareholder loan that was never properly cleared. Finding an issue does not automatically mean amending the prior return.
The decision generally weighs:
- Materiality. A small classification difference that doesn’t change tax payable is rarely worth an amendment. A misclassified amount that changes taxable income or a claimed credit is a different question.
- The reassessment window. CRA can generally reassess a CCPC’s T2 within three years of the original notice of assessment, four years for corporations that are not CCPCs, and a T1 within three years of the original notice of assessment. Those normal periods can be extended in situations such as misrepresentation attributable to neglect, carelessness or wilful default, fraud, waivers, and certain specified transactions, so errors outside the normal window still need professional judgment rather than an automatic “ignore it” answer.
- Whether the issue is a one-time item or a pattern. A single miscoded expense is handled differently than a structural issue, like GST/HST never having been properly charged on a category of supply, that repeats across every filed period.
- Whether the amount and pattern point toward a voluntary disclosure rather than a routine amendment. Unreported income or a GST/HST registration that should have happened years earlier are the kind of findings that call for that separate conversation before anything is filed.
This triage should happen before any amendment is filed, not as a reflexive response to every discrepancy found during the handover.
Timing the Switch
Switching mid-fiscal-year is workable, but it changes what the new accountant needs. Instead of a clean prior year’s filed return as the starting point, the new accountant is picking up bookkeeping partway through an open year and needs the year-to-date trial balance, bank reconciliations, and any transactions already recorded for the current period.
Switching at or shortly after a fiscal year-end gives the new accountant a completed, filed prior year to build from, with the current year starting clean under the new arrangement. Neither timing is wrong, but the mid-year switch requires more upfront reconciliation work to establish where the books actually stand before ongoing monthly work begins.
What Comes After the Review
Once the prior-year review and records handover are complete, a new accountant typically issues a fixed-fee proposal for ongoing work based on the actual condition of the file rather than an assumption made before seeing the records. A file with a clean handover and no unresolved issues costs less to bring current than one with a shareholder loan that’s carried an unresolved balance for two years or GST/HST filings that need reconstruction.
The switching accountants overview walks through the six-step transition process from compliance review to fixed-fee proposal. The new client file review service describes the paid review offering for contractors who want a professional assessment of their file’s condition before committing to a full transition.