: Can I avoid an audit by submitting documents early? I make a lot of charitable donations every year (I donate 10% of my net income to my church), lots of people in my church get audited every year. Is there a way I can avoid

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I personally don't think submitting early is going to make a difference. While the exact process of selecting who to audit will always remain secret, it's obvious that certain things will make your tax return more likely to get flagged for potential audit. Large charitable donations would be one of those things.

I strongly recommend you do not send your receipts to the CRA until they ask for them, as they do not expect people to include the receipts with their returns, and the department processing the mailed-in tax forms might lose them, or store them away somewhere that could create a future hassle if/when you get a letter asking you to send in copies of the receipts. Instead, just keep them filed away with your tax stuff for at least 5 years.

While the CRA is likely to want evidence of large donations, it's unlikely that they will bother to do a careful audit of the entire return - they will often just ask for specific pieces of evidence (like bus passes if you claim the public transit credit). So it's really not as much of a hassle to deal with as you might be thinking.