Worked for a US company from Canada

HelloCanada wrote: I need advice from any senior members of the forum on a special situation. I moved to Canada around July 2010 and for about one year, I continued to work for the company in USA and got paid in USA. I was supporting a client in Canada and was living/working remotely from Canada. I was physically present in Canada during this time and I have all proofs (Apt lease, Bank/Credit card statements, Car insurance etc). How should I declare the employment for this one year period? Should I mention the country as USA or Canada? Can I mention the client name in Canada instead of the employer name in USA? Please advise.

In a general sense, participants here do offer advice of a sort. I just want to emphasize, however, that this is not an appropriate venue for obtaining formal advice. Mostly we offer observations and comments, share experiences, point others to resources. In particular, I am not qualified to offer advice to individuals regarding specific cases. Sorry for this tangent, but it is important to distinguish the kind of advice you can obtain from a licensed professional from what is available in a forum like this.

In any event, some observations:

If you have not looked at the online application in the last few days, you should note that once again CIC has a new application form. One of the biggest changes is that it now includes a request for employment records to be submitted with the application. These should help in clarifying, for CIC, precisely what your employment has been.

I see the difficulty you have in deciding how to actually populate the particular fields in the form regarding the employment situation you describe, particularly as to city and country. Generally I think it is safe, and accurate, to put down the location of where you actually did the work for which you were employed, that is, your regular place of working (doing business, or such). But of course you do not want CIC to get the impression you are being at all deceptive. And, to some extent, this part of the application is ambiguous. Is the field for entering city and country intended to be populated by where the employer is located? or where the employee regularly works? (And this can get messy for someone who, for example, travels extensively, working at the place where the client or customer is located for example.)

My sense would be to state the city and country based on where you actually, regularly, do the work, but perhaps include a supplemental page (perhaps a cover page for your records of employment) explaining things . . . in some detail but in simple terms.

The difficulty of course comes from being an "employee" for a company that does not have a business location in Canada. If, in contrast, the relationship with the employer is something other than employer-employee, such as an independent contractor, a supplier, or a contributor (my case), how this is described in the form depends on what that relationship actually is. This makes it easier to know that the location (city, country) should be where the applicant is, where the applicant actually does the work, but of course going forward with the new application form there is then the difficulty of compiling the appropriate records of employment to submit.

Note: my sense is that there may be some revisions coming soon for the guide (if not already done since the last time I looked), with more specific instructions for employment records. It may be a good idea to wait a bit to see if CIC soon updates its instructions in this respect. As of the last time I looked there the instructions were not particularly helpful.