This year, all tax businesses are required to use AFR (auto-fill return) from CRA, and then match/add with the tax slips clients bring in. One does need to be careful wrt Auto-Fill from CRA, especially the T3s and T5008s. The confusions are mostly caused by the issuers of these slips, not by CRA (but the investment type on T5008 might done by CRA on purpose
)
For T3s, the issuers (e.g. TD waterhouse or others) sent customer one per account, but to CRA they often sent one per fund/stock, so CRA could have more T3 slips then you have. If that happens to you, you just need to add them together, double check the total, and not use those from CRA, but the one you received as long as the totals match.
For T5008, it could be from 1. sale of the stocks or funds, or 2. HSA money taking out which is treated as mutual fund, say TDW (TDB8150). For the HSA, it is income (not capital gain/loss), but the cost base should the same as the proceed (say for TDB8150, $10 per unit * total units sold), and the issuer should also have issued a separate T5/T3 for any interest earned in that account.
For stocks or mutual funds, you can either
- Use the T5008 (but choose the investment type as Capital Gain/Loss rather than income), and make sure the correct book value is there (note some T5008s do have the correct book value from the issuers. But if the book value is zero in CRA version and you know it is not, then that is normally the issuer's fault that they missed reporting it).
- Or you can just ignore the T5008s, use the schedule 3 to report the capital gain/loss as you did before.
This is the first year I see T5008 for HSAs. We have six from TDW TDB8150, one for each time when we moved money out, even in the same account. It is really a waste, as for HSAs, book value should be the same as the proceed. And make it worse, TDW recorded our HSA book values as zero and sent the T5008s to CRA only (not to us, there is no sign of T5008 slip in our e-statements).
For TDB8150, I would really think it is silliness of TDW that they don't fully understand the function of T5008 and didn't put in correct book value (they should know the unit cost = $10 per share) before sending them to CRA.
“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react.” — Charles R. Swindoll