How Google Maps helped one Toronto commuter beat traffic — and the tax collector
How Google Maps helped one Toronto commuter beat traffic — and the tax collector
A simple question lies behind Patrick de Kruyff's Tax Court of Canada victory last month over the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA): Who on earth would suggest taking Toronto's Don Valley Parkway at rush hour?
An auditor in Vancouver, that's who.
The basic rule for the deduction is that the move has to cut at least 40 kilometres off the daily commute.
But for some reason Google Maps kept giving the CRA a much shorter route than it did de Kryuff, despite the fact they both punched in the same coordinates at the same time of day Monday to Friday — the heart of rush hour, 4:45 p.m.
And then de Kruyff found the flaw that led to a precedent-setting ruling that could pave the way for tax relief for other urban commuters: the CRA's employee was in B.C. — getting Google Maps's suggestions to navigate Toronto traffic at 4:45 p.m. Pacific time.
That's 7:45 p.m. Eastern.
For those wondering.
The claimant was comparing the route suggested by Google maps between their old location to work and their new location to work, in order to make a tax claim for having moved more than 40 km to improve their commute time.
The tax department was denying the claim because they were seeing a different route suggested, because they were checking from a different timezone. Their local clock said the same as the claimant's clock, but the two timezones were different, so traffic conditions were different, thus the suggested route was different and the total distance travelled was different.
This opens up a whole different can of worms, but I'll leave you to discover what happens when you rely on a third party mapping service to make tax deductible decisions. For example, what happens when Google changes how it calculates "the fastest route" between the time when you make a claim and when the tax department checks? What happens when you tick "avoid toll roads" and they don't, what happens when you pick "best environmental route" and they don't, electric vs petrol, plug type vs charge level, etc.