Ingram slammed with $5M
billKatharine Hamer
khamer@nsnews.com
DAVID Ingram just got dinged for a
$4.8-million tax bill.
The West Vancouver-based tax consultant,
best known to North Shore residents as the longtime host of the Ingram
show on Rogers (now Shaw) Cable, was served Tuesday with a petition for a
receiving order by the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency (CCRA).
The petition demands that Ingram turn
over "any and all of his personal property" to the CCRA. It relates to a
CCRA investigation that began more than 20 years ago.
Ingram's former company, CEN-TA Operating
Co. Ltd., was audited by the CCRA in 1985. Tax returns filed between 1979
and 1982 were questioned because of a $1-million cheque that was made out
to Ingram personally and mistakenly deposited to his personal account,
rather than a company account, he told the North Shore News on Wednesday.
"It's a 20-year-old thing, where they
started an assessment in '85," Ingram explained. "They went to trial in
1990. The trial took place over five months. In 1992, the judge ruled
against me, and it's taken 10 years for them to move with the
receivership.
"I've been in this business for 37 years,
and I have never seen Revenue Canada put an individual into receivership.
I'm sure they've done it before, but I've never seen it, and that's with
offices across Canada. So this is really rare."
At the time of the investigation, Ingram
controlled two companies. One was CEN-TA Operating Co. Ltd., which then
had 220 employees. The other was a real estate company, David Ingram and
Associates Realty, with no employees.
"I can still remember the accountant
saying, 'Who do you want the cheque made out to?'" said Ingram, "and I
said, 'It doesn't matter.'
"So the money essentially, and there was
a letter that went with it, was deposited to the company account. I don't
think I ever saw the cheque, it was just one of many cheques. We did over
$500- million worth of business in those three years, so a million dollars
was irrelevant.
"The chartered accountant who looked
after our books - because I didn't do it, the tax office admits I never
saw the money - took it to be my personal money and treated it as if I had
loaned the money to the company. And when I saw the books she'd prepared,
I said, 'I didn't loan any money to the company.' She said, 'Oh,' and
reversed it.
"Everything else from that point was just
deposited directly to the company, which was properly what it should be.
"When the tax office did an audit, there
were two auditors. One, the supervisor, decided this should be taxable to
me. It was arbitrary, it was capricious, because her assistant even
testified in the courtroom that she didn't think it should be taxable to
me."
At the time of the judge's decision in
1992, a tax bill was issued to Ingram for $535,000. By then, the interest
on the bill had brought the total owed by Ingram to $3 million.
"I never for a second thought that I
would lose (the case)," said Ingram, "because if I thought I'd lose it, I
would have sold my house and bought another one in my wife's name or
something. As it is, the tax office is going to get the value of the
house. They won't get the house, because we'll just buy it out."
Ingram said that under bankruptcy
regulations, he and his wife would be given $12,000 out of the equity of
their home.
He said that ironically, he and his wife,
Jose, had already been considering selling up and moving away from the
North Shore.
He said that as of June 29, the total tax
bill was $4,853,238, with interest accruing at around $1,000 a day.
"I've offered to settle with them a
couple of times," he said, "and I offered to settle with them at times
which they would have got as much money or more than they're going to get
this way but they haven't settled and they've now moved to put me into
receivership.
"Now I could fight the motion for
receivership. I'm not going to bother, I'm just going to let it happen and
let the thing go sideways."
In fact, in some ways, he calls the CCRA
move "a relief. It's finished now."
The petition will not affect the Ingrams'
business.
Ingram stopped operating his business in
1992. His wife, Jose, used her credit and began a new operation, under the
name The CEN-TA Group. Everything to do with the company, including all of
its assets, is under her name.
Ingram says it's now a completely
different business.
"This all took place before I married my
wife and before we had three children, one of whom is now 19. That's how
old it is. I did not even know the lady existed at that time."
At one time Ingram administered as many
as 672 offices across Canada and in 13 American states.
Today, he says, "I consider myself a tax
consultant. At the time that this took place, I was more of a Colonel
Sanders. I owned offices that did tax returns but I didn't do tax returns,
and I certainly didn't do the books or records of the company. There were
professional lawyers and accountants that did that."
The CEN-TA Group has five offices,
including locations in Ottawa, Abbotsford, Surrey and Park Royal. Jose
Ingram operates the Park Royal office. The others are run by former
partners of Ingram's and his ex-wife. He said he does not receive any
payment from the offices.
Ingram hosted his own talk show on Rogers
Cable from 1997 to 2001, when he was replaced by Fanny Kiefer, host of
Studio 4.
He says that since then he has "just
taken a year off," although he has received other offers for media work.
CCRA spokeswoman Faith St. John told the
News on Wednesday that due to confidentiality agreements she could not
comment specifically on the case. She did confirm, however, that a
petition had been filed with the federal court in Vancouver.
St. John said it was rare for proceedings
to reach this level.
"We make every effort to arrive at a
mutually satisfactory agreement," she said.
"We don't say, 'Oh, you didn't pay your
taxes, let's go do something. This type of activity (the petition) is at
the extreme end of the scale."
