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ARTICLE · 28 NOVEMBER 2023

Employee Ownership Trusts—Improved Tax Incentives Announced

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The Canadian Department of Finance introduced draft legislation in the 2023 Canadian Federal Budget (Budget 2023) to create employee ownership trusts (EOTs) to facilitate the transfer of a business to the employees...

CanadaTax
Wesley Novotny
Wesley Novotny
Marshall R. Haughey
Marshall R. Haughey
Wade Ritchie
Wade Ritchie
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The Canadian Department of Finance introduced draft legislation in the 2023 Canadian Federal Budget (Budget 2023) to create employee ownership trusts (EOTs) to facilitate the transfer of a business to the employees of the business. We provided an overview of the rules initially proposed in Budget 2023 in Employee Ownership Trusts—A Useful Tool for Employee Business Ownership?, and recommended various revisions to the proposed rules to improve the tax incentives and ease some of the conditions required to qualify for EOT treatment. The Department of Finance released revised EOT legislation on August 4, 2023, addressing some of our concerns but not the big one—the revised EOT legislation still contained minimal tax incentives.

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