Hi there!
My spouse and I started living together in March 2023, making us officially common-law in March 2024. We filed our 2023 taxes as single, and changed our marital status and filed as common law in 2024.
This year, I received a letter in the mail asking to confirm our move in date, and date of marital status change. I filled the form out correctly with the information above, and sent it off. The CRA then sent another letter saying they’ve “updated” my marital status change to March 2024, and now we owe almost 4K.
We are both extremely confused as our marital status change was always as of March 2024. There was nothing to update, it was ALWAYS that date. We even went through our tax forms and CRA information/messages to confirm that we had stated we were common-law as of March 2024.
As we looked through our benefits and such, it does seem that the CRA was giving us both benefits all of 2024 that then suddenly stopped, or decreased drastically in 2025, but as they had already re-assessed our benefits when we changed our marital status to 2024, and had already owed and payed back any overpayments, we assumed we were in the clear.
My question is, what do we do now? We did everything right that we were supposed to do, we claimed common-law when we became common law in 2024. Why would they “update” our marital status to a date that was already determined, and now we suddenly owe 4K?