The Canada Revenue Agency is sitting on $1-billion in unclaimed tax refunds and some of that money might belong to you.
A month has passed since the CRA launched a new 'uncashed cheques' feature on its website and the early numbers are in.
Now, thanks to a new link on the CRA website, taxpayers can find out if there’s any unclaimed money in their name.
Since the feature was launched on Feb. 10, 1.4 million Canadians have logged in to see if there’s money waiting for them.
Fifty eight thousand of those people have found they had uncashed cheques through the online My Account.
Edmonton’s Tyler Gerry was one of them.
After learning about the CRA’s new online feature through a news story he saw online, he logged in and checked it out.
"I had one cheque for approximately $90 from 2014 and one for $270 from 2015," Gerry told CTV News Edmonton.
"I didn’t even know that was possible," said Gerry. "I thought that was basically just money 'lost and reabsorbed by the CRA.”
According to Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue, Francesco Sorbara, roughly 5 million Canadians left 7.6 million cheques uncashed since 1998.
"That’s approximately $1 billion in unclaimed funds," Sorbara told CTV News in its Ottawa studio.
"For whatever reason these cheques were not cashed. They could’ve been lost, they could’ve been the wrong address," said Sorbara. "Now that they’ve requested duplicate cheque’s they’re getting the money that they deserve."
As for the individual amounts still unclaimed, Sorbara said there could be anywhere from small amounts, potentially into thousands.
In the meantime, Gerry recognizes the found money isn’t life changing.
"I was excited to find that I had some money owed to me," he said. "I'll just put it into savings when I receive it."
"Since this new feature was just recently launched we are still analyzing the impacts it has had to reduce the numbers of uncashed cheques with the CRA," the CRA’s Pamela Tourigny told CTV News Edmonton in a written statement.
Since the feature is now a permanent fixture on the CRA website, you can log in anytime to see if there’s money waiting for you.
