How to switch accountants in Canada (no form announces the switch)

Summary

If you’re moving your corporation’s accounting from one firm to another, no form tells the government you’ve changed accountants, and there’s no regulator to notify. What the Canada Revenue Agency (the CRA) keeps is a list of authorized representatives, meaning the people you’ve allowed to see and act on your company’s tax accounts. Changing that list, and moving your records, is most of the job. We’d run it in this order.

1. Get your own login to My Business Account, the CRA’s online portal for business owners, and start here rather than with choosing a firm. The first authorization has to come from a director, meaning someone formally appointed to the company’s board, which in a one-person company is almost always you. Proving your identity with a code the CRA mails to you on paper takes up to 10 business days (2026).¹
2. Authorize the new firm, then remove the old one in the same week. Adding a representative removes nobody, and an old accountant’s access doesn’t lapse on its own unless an end date was set for it.² We’d give a new firm what the CRA calls level 2 access, meaning they can see your accounts and act on them but can’t pass access to anyone else. Apply it to every tax account your company holds, not just corporate income tax.
3. Ask your outgoing accountant, in writing, for a short list of documents rather than for everything, and move any bookkeeping subscription into your company’s name.

In our view the cleanest time to move is just after a corporate return has been filed and assessed, meaning the CRA has processed it and sent back a notice confirming the tax it agrees you owe. That year’s bookkeeping is finished, so your new firm can check that the balances it starts from match what was filed. Waiting for that moment costs you patience, since it can be nearly a year away. If you’re leaving because filings are late or nobody is answering you, move mid-year instead, and expect a one-off fee for picking up a part-finished year, worth asking about in writing first.

The audit fear

Changing the authorized representative is a permission change, and it doesn’t itself amend any of the corporation’s tax returns. You’ll sign a CRA form or two along the way, but none reports the switch. Fear of triggering an audit keeps many owners with a firm they’ve lost confidence in, and in our view it’s misplaced: adding or removing a representative is a permission change rather than a filing.

Your own access to My Business Account

My Business Account is the CRA’s online portal for a business owner, not the Represent a Client portal your accountant signs into. The first authorization has to come from a director, or from an existing level 3 delegated authority (described below), so sort your access out first.⁴

Two things commonly block registration. If you’ve never filed a personal tax return, or haven’t filed one in the last two years, you can’t register for a CRA account until you do, unless you sign in through the Alberta or British Columbia provincial partner.¹ Second, the CRA needs a director’s social insurance number on file before you can add your business number, the nine-digit number identifying your business, to the account. Otherwise adding the number errors out, and the fix is a call to business enquiries on 1-800-959-5525.⁴

Registering means proving who you are, by one of two routes offered at sign-up. The CRA’s own document verification service uses your phone camera and Canadian photo identification (e.g. a passport or driver’s licence), and gives access immediately. Otherwise the CRA mails a security code to the address it holds for you, which takes up to 10 business days.¹ Do this in the week you start thinking about switching, since it decides whether the move takes days or weeks.

Authorizing the new firm, and at what level

You can add the firm yourself under Profile and “Authorized representatives”, using one of three identifiers it has to give you: the RepID of the accountant who’ll act for you, the GroupID covering their team, or the firm’s business number. You can’t look them up, so ask which to use. Alternatively the firm submits a request and you approve it under “Confirm pending authorizations”, within 10 business days or it’s cancelled.⁵ Access is live the moment you confirm, on a clock separate from the security-code one.

You then pick two settings, starting with a level of access. Level 1 lets a firm look at your accounts and nothing else. Level 2 also lets them act: file returns, change an address, correct or dispute an amount, but not give anyone else access. Level 3, which the CRA calls delegated authority, comes close to everything you can do yourself, including adding their own staff, so the list of people who can see your tax affairs grows without anyone telling you.⁶ Level 1 costs you a bottleneck, since every routine correction comes back to you, and level 3 costs you that growing list. In our view level 2 suits an external firm, unless you’re certain you’ll never sign in yourself.

The second setting is scope: every program account under your business number, or only some. Program accounts are the separate tax accounts hanging off that number, each with a two-letter code (e.g. RC for corporate income tax, RT for GST/HST sales tax, RP for payroll), and most companies have at least two. Authorizing the corporate account alone is a common and costly slip, because a sales tax return then falls due on an account your new firm can’t see.

Removing the old firm

Removal is a separate act that never happens by itself. A representative’s access stays until you cancel it, they cancel it, or an end date arrives, and that end date exists only if you set one when you authorize the firm.² Removing a firm in My Business Account takes effect immediately, and the alternatives (a phone call, or the paper cancellation form) both take longer.²

What to ask your outgoing accountant for

Ask for a short, specific list, because a request for everything is easy to park. Ours has three items:

• Your last two filed T2 returns with their notices of assessment, plus the financial statements for those years. Two years is enough, because your new firm can pull older ones from the CRA once its access is live.
• The year-end adjusting journal entries, meaning the corrections that turn your day-to-day bookkeeping into the numbers actually filed, and the closing trial balance those entries produce, meaning the list of account balances the return was built from. Without it your bookkeeping file’s opening balances for the new year won’t match what was filed, and somebody has to be paid to find out why.
• Three running balances that live nowhere but your accountant’s file, each to ask for by name: your capital dividend account balance (the total your company can pay you tax-free), any unused losses from earlier years that can still be set against future profits, and your shareholder loan balance, meaning money moved between you personally and the company.

If your outgoing accountant is a Chartered Professional Accountant, meaning a designation policed by a provincial body with a binding code of conduct, most of that list is already yours. What’s yours is what you gave them, plus the statements, returns and schedules you paid for, but not their internal notes. Wherever in Canada they’re registered, they have to hand it over promptly when you ask, and a complaint to their provincial body is the lever if they stall.⁷ The most recent year comes free by convention rather than by law, so ask the price of the second year first.

Where the person you’re leaving holds no designation, which is legal in Canada, the CPA professional rules don’t apply, though contractual duties and your ownership of the records still matter. Download your own copies first: a backup of the bookkeeping file, plus PDFs of everything on the list above. Check who pays the bookkeeping subscription too: if the firm pays it, the account is theirs and they can lock you out the day you leave.

How often this changes

The mechanics move faster than the tax rules do, so we re-check this article yearly and whenever the CRA changes its portals. What would make you work through the checklist again sooner is a change in how your business is set up, not in the rules. A second corporation (e.g. a holding company that owns the shares of your main one), or a family trust, has its own CRA accounts and its own authorization, so the checklist runs once per entity. A business filing with Revenu Québec needs a Quebec authorization as well. Quebec runs its own regime and we don’t cover it, so those steps aren’t here.

Closing thoughts

Most of a switch is waiting rather than working, and the wait is set by whether you can sign in to your own CRA accounts on day one. Owners who can sign in themselves spot problems earlier in ordinary years too.

How we handle it

We send one authorization request and one engagement letter, the contract setting out what we’ll do, what it costs and what we need from you. Then we chase your outgoing accountant ourselves for the list above, and follow up until every item is in our hands. We confirm the old representative is removed once ours is live, and build your filing calendar, the dated list of every return and payment your company owes over the next year.