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The Real Cost of Ignoring Tax Deadlines (Hint: It’s Not Just Interest)

29 Dec 2025 · 1 min

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1:22

Bob Gauvreau warns that ignoring tax deadlines (sales tax, payroll liabilities, corporate/personal tax) leads to substantial penalties—failure-to-file and misrepresentation penalties—that can exceed interest charges and professional fees. He advises filing tax returns on time even if you cannot pay the liability (to avoid failure-to-file penalties), notes interest may still accrue, and recommends engaging a bookkeeper and accounting firm to ensure filings are done on schedule, provide transparency, and reduce risk.

Chapters

Ignoring tax deadlines is one of the worst strategies that you could possibly apply in your business. I see it all the time. Businesses come in and work with us and they've been missing their sales tax filing, they missed their payroll liabilities filing, they missed their corporate or personal tax filing. All this does is it incurs penalties related to those filings, and they can be quite substantial, including failure to file penalties or misrepresentation. You could be looking at getting yourself in a lot of trouble. Instead, even if you can't afford to pay the tax liability that's owing, we want to make sure that everything gets filed on time. We may owe interest related to not being able to pay that debt at the current time, but at least we're not incurring penalties for failure to file or missing any of those deadlines. Those penalties can end up being way more expensive than any professional fees that you would incur to get it done on time. And in fact, the proactive way to do this is to get a bookkeeper and an accounting firm in place to make sure all of your filings are done regularly on time. Give you the transparency over what's going on in your business, and you'll avoid all those interest and penalties associated with those filings, and your business will be in a much better position. Plus, you're supported by the professionals that are in the bookkeeping and accounting team.