Americans sold property in Quebec and Notary is still holding our funds and has ghosted us
I am hoping some redditors will have the patience to read this post and provide some advice.
tl;dr The Canadian Revenue Agency won't talk to us and our Notary has ghosted us.
I am an American that owned land with a cabin on it in Quebec. We sold the property a year ago and a Notary has been handling the process. The notary withheld 55% of the sale in an escrow account until the certificates of discharge were filed, from which they were to pay the government tax on the sale on our behalf. The Notary also took a $5000 retainer for their expenses.
Issue 1: As I said, it has been a year since our sale. We have not received our certificates of discharge from the Canada Revenue Agency. We are unable to talk to the CRA about our case directly as we can’t be “verified” because we have never filed income tax in Canada. Therefore, we have to go through the Notary. The CRA agent we spoke to said this sale transaction should take no longer than 180 days even for a foreigner and said it seems like something must be wrong. She suggested we ask the Notary for a copy of our T2062 and get the date on which it was filed as well as a copy of the provincial certificates. She said to ask the Notary if they have received correspondence indicating anything is wrong. The agent said that a Notary would have normally given copies of all these documents to us when they were filed. We have nothing. We have repeatedly asked in writing and have left messages trying to get this information but the Notary, who has been less than responsive through this whole process, has not returned our calls or emails for weeks and in some cases months.
Issue 2: The Notary filed some type of paperwork after the sale, but we received an $800 fine from the government for a late filing. The Notary says it’s because we didn’t sign a Power of Attorney in time, but the request for us to sign the POA came well after the 10 day filing window.
Issue 3: We have asked on 5 different occasions going back months for an accounting of the $5,000 retainer. No response.
Issue 4: Lastly, we have now missed the April 30 tax filing deadline. Our accountant says we can’t file a tax return without any documentation from the Notary.
We have spoken to the Chambre des Notaires regarding filing a complaint and plan to do so, but what we really need to do is to finish this process somehow.
What are our options?