Bare Trusts & Trust Reporting: The Filing Obligation Isn't Going Away

Nothing about a trust / bare trust announces itself. Often there is no deed, no trustee who thinks of themselves as one, no income on a return. After three years of reporting relief, the filing obligation for taxation years ending after December 30, 2026 returns in a form that exempts some family arrangements — with significant penalties possible for non-compliance.

Live date Oct 16, 2026
Live time 12:00 – 2:00 ET
Duration 120 minutes
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Bare Trust
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Live session + Q&A

105 minutes of teaching plus 15 minutes of live Q&A discussion.

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Recording access

The webinar recording will be available shortly following the live event.

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Detailed slide deck

Includes tax tables, worked examples, planning notes, technical references, and supporting resource materials.

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CPD certificate

A CPD certificate is available after successful quiz completion.

INCLUDED PRACTITIONER TOOL

Trust Reporting Navigator

Make sure you've asked the questions that could change the answer.

Assess T3 and Schedule 15 filing requirements

Work through the file and identify when more information or professional judgment is required.

CTM Insight & Judgment

Understand why each question matters, where professional judgment is required and where files commonly go wrong.

Save and return

Save your analysis and return as additional facts are confirmed.

Detailed practitioner summary

Create a structured summary of the relevant facts, conclusion, technical basis, documentation and outstanding items .

Trust Reporting Navigator screenshot

Built to be used on a real file.

Full access to the Trust Reporting Navigator is included with this course and CTM Membership.

Real-world planning question

No agreement, no document, no tax owing — and now, for some arrangements, no filing.

The session works through many client arrangements that often have the same line: there is no formal trust agreement, and nobody involved believes they created a trust. An adult child holding sole title to a parent's cottage. A joint account with an adult child that sits under $50,000 in January and clears it by November. A nominee corporation left over from a project that finished years ago. Farmland registered in a grandfather's name and farmed through the family corporation ever since. Are there reporting obligations in these types of scenarios?

What we'll work through

01

What Changed, and What the Rules Now Ask

  • The transparency rationale, from the 2018 federal Budget forward, and what the regime was built to collect
  • Filing where no tax is payable — how 150(1.2) displaces the 150(1.1) exemption
  • Three years of relief, with new amendments.
  • The freestanding inclusion in 150(1.3), and why 104(1) continues to ignore bare trusts everywhere else in the Act
02

Is There a Trust at All?

  • The three certainties, and the relationships that fail them — agency, joint venture, partnership, joint tenancy
  • "Express trust" is undefined in the Act; what the term is generally understood to carry
  • The agency description in 150(1.3): legal ownership held for another's use or benefit, where the legal owner can reasonably be considered to act as agent
  • How little the legal owner has to do to meet it, and what degree of independent discretion takes an arrangement out of "bare" altogether
  • Arrangements that commonly answer the description: registered title, in-trust accounts, names added for probate, financing or licensing
03

Listed Trusts and the Value Thresholds

  • The two-branch test, and which trusts sit outside the regime entirely
  • The listed-trust exceptions running through 150(1.2)(a) to (r)
  • The $50,000 exception — now free of any restriction on asset type, and tested throughout the year rather than at a moment in it
  • The $250,000 family exception in 150(1.2)(b.1): individual trustees, related beneficiaries, and a closed list of qualifying assets
  • Deemed trusts created elsewhere in the Act, which of them the exceptions already catch, and the 149(5) club that files with trustees but no settlor or beneficiary
04

The Exemptions Written for Bare Trust Arrangements

  • Mirror ownership under 150(1.31)(a) — every beneficiary a legal owner, and no legal owner left out
  • Related individuals holding real property capable of being a principal residence of one of them
  • Real property held by an individual for a spouse or common-law partner
  • Partnership property where each legal owner is a partner other than a limited partner, and a T5013 is required
  • Court-ordered holdings, Canadian resource property held for public corporations, and government funds held by exempt persons
05

Client Arrangements, Worked Through

  • Joint accounts between spouses, and joint accounts opened with an adult child for convenience
  • Names on title for probate, for mortgage qualification, and where the titleholder does not inhabit the property
  • In-trust-for accounts for a minor child or grandchild, and where characterisation has to be settled before the thresholds are reached for
  • Nominee corporations on title to real estate, bare trustees in joint ventures, and land held through the entitlement and construction phases
  • Registered title held for a partnership, by a general partner and by a non-partner nominee
06

Schedule 15, Penalties, and What Compliance Costs

  • Each legal owner treated as a trustee, each beneficial owner as a beneficiary, and what that produces on the schedule
  • Who is responsible for filing, and what Regulation 204.2 requires for each reportable person
  • Persons with influence over trustee decisions, contingent and class beneficiaries, and the "reasonable effort" standard
  • Trust account numbers, and why the request goes in well before the return is due
  • The standard late-filing penalty, and the separate gross-negligence penalty measured against property value rather than tax

What This Area Teaches Beyond a Filing Deadline

The immediate subject is a return and a schedule that many clients will not have to file. The durable skill is recognizing a trust relationship in a file where nobody set out to create one, and being able to explain, years later, why you concluded what you did.

Characterization Comes Before Compliance

Whether an arrangement is a trust at all is a question about intention, property and objects, settled long before a form is opened. Broader exemptions reduce filings without reducing the work: the analysis still has to be run to find out whether a carve-out spares the reporting.

A Statutory Test Still Rests on Facts You Have to Establish

The Act now describes the arrangement it reaches, but whether a given set of facts answers that description — and whether an exemption reaches it — remains a question of fact and law. Positions in that space rest on the surrounding evidence and on professional judgment rather than certainty.

A Decision Not to File Is Still a Position

Concluding that an arrangement is exempt is a position taken, and one that may need to be explained long after the facts have gone cold. Where an obligation does arise, satisfying it can mean telling a beneficiary about wealth they did not know existed. Neither is a technical question, and no technical answer disposes of either.

Learn with Kim and Jay

Kim G C Moody

Tax Authority

Kim G C Moody

LinkedIn

FCPA, FCA, TEP

  • Former Chair, CBA/CPA Joint Committee
  • Former Chair, Canadian Tax Foundation
  • Parliamentary committee witness
Jay Goodis

TAX STRATEGY & OPTIMIZATION

Jay Goodis

LinkedIn

CPA, CA

  • CPA Ontario Emerging Leader
  • Parliamentary committee witness
  • National tax & keynote speaker

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You will have access to the recording and course materials through your CTM account for one year. CTM members can access course materials while their membership is active.

Yes. A CPD certificate is available after successful quiz completion.

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