To claim or not to claim

[CrazyEight]

If you make more than $50 a week and you don't claim it, you are committing tax fraud, as the above poster mentioned, and it is illegal. There may BE "many ways to run a daycare," but there is only one legitimate way, by claiming all your income, all your expenses, and paying the taxes you owe. Sorry, just how it is.

I don't want to be harsh, but it's incredibly frustrating to see so many "babysitters" in my city blatantly stating in their ads that they don't offer receipts, usually because they're already collecting EI and don't want that to disappear once the government knows they're making other money. Again, this is also illegal. They are usually incredibly cheap, they are usually over in numbers (hey, if you're already breaking one law, why not break some more??), and since they can't claim food expenses in their tax deductions, my guess is that they feed their daycare kids as cheaply as possible, which is not always the healthiest.

Providers like this make the rest of us look like money-grabbing totalitarians, with our contracts, higher fees (to reflect things like taxes and expenses) and other rules. If every provider would simply abide by the LAW, our fees would at least all be in the same ballpark for our city and average income, and parents would stop assuming that every provider should offer full-time care for $15 a day!!

Just....no. Claim your income, pay your taxes, and realize all the benefits you get from those tax dollars. You may not always agree with it, but we live in Canada - that's how it is. I don't need to think about yet more people skirting the system to get out of paying taxes, and at the same time stealing clients away from legitimate business-owners who ARE following the rules, even if we don't always agree with them.