Dates and location
Pricing
Hours
Dates and location
Pricing
Hours
Description
This course is designed to assist experienced tax practitioners in planning for owner-manager / private company business succession. The course will walk through the various stages of a business life cycle, with a view to identifying opportunities, techniques and tax considerations associated to intra-family and arm’s length succession planning for private companies.
Business succession involving closely held private companies can range from an intra-family estate plan to an arm’s length sale of shares. This seminar will provide practical knowledge of the principal business succession considerations. The focus will be on income tax considerations, although key non-tax issues will also be identified.
This seminar provides knowledge and tools necessary to identify, plan and manage business succession considerations for owner-managers of private companies through various phases of a business life cycle. The content is practical but also technically focused, while covering the pertinent tax issues in depth. This seminar will provide a working knowledge of the principal tax and non-tax considerations in formulating and implementing business succession plans, along with detailed written materials for reference.
Topics Include:
- General tax and non-tax considerations related to business succession and estate planning for owner/managers
- The ‘Wealth Cycle’ of an owner/manager’s private enterprise
- Estate freeze techniques and common corporate tax-deferred rollovers
- Divisive reorganizations (related party and unrelated party butterflies)
- Arm’s length and non-arm’s length divestiture planning
- Capital gains exemption planning and ‘purification’ techniques
- Post-mortem planning techniques
NOTE: This course description has been revised and reflects updates for 2025. If you have any questions, please contact pdevents@cpaontario.ca.
Schedule
- December 2, 2025, 8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
- December 3, 2025, 8:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Key Takeaways
By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
- Identify and categorize an owner manager’s stage in the ‘wealth cycle’ for succession planning purposes.
- Identify and apply business succession alternatives, including the associated tax and non-tax considerations.
- Implement various estate freezing techniques, including the internal vs. external estate freeze, wasting estate freeze and refreezing transactions.
- Identify instances of post-mortem double-taxation and advise upon the techniques available to mitigate such instances.
- Understand the principals that surround valuation, price adjustment clauses and attribution rules, as those concepts relate to estate freeze transactions and succession planning.
- Identify opportunities to involve the use of family trusts, alter-ego trusts and joint-spousal trusts in estate planning.
- Identify and avoid the potential traps and instances of double-taxation that could arise through intra-family transactions and succession plans.
- Determine the tax implications associated to arm’s length sale of private company shares, including the capital gains exemption (with purification strategies) and capital gains deferral rules.
- Identify and appreciate the potential application of the anti-surplus stripping rules in sections 84.1 and 55(2) of the Income Tax Act.
- Implement related-party divisive reorganizations and gain a basic understanding of ‘butterfly’ reorganizations involving unrelated parties.
Who Will Benefit
This course will be useful to accountants in public practice with clients who are owner-managers of private corporations, as well as in-house professionals of private enterprises, especially those facing succession issues.
Prerequisite(s)
- This course is presented at an intermediate to advanced level, with the assumption that participants will have sufficient basic knowledge and experience in the areas of private company tax planning and transactions involving private company shares.
- Recommended: Corporate Tax: RDTOH, CDA and Other Tax Accounts.
How to Access the Course
This course is a live webinar. You must attend the live course to receive verifiable CPD hours. We recommend you join five minutes prior to the scheduled starting time. To get the full experience of this interactive course, use a computer that has video and microphone capabilities.
Electronic material can be accessed one week prior to the course and should be downloaded in advance.
Registration, cancellation, withdrawal and all other CPA Ontario PD policies can be found here.
Speaker(s)
Karen Wilkinson, FCPA, FCA is President of Karen Wilkinson Professional Corporation. She was previously a Tax Partner with Deloitte LLP with over 25 years of tax experience. Karen's practice is focused on assisting private companies and their owners in maximizing wealth and transitioning the business to the next generation. While at Deloitte LLP, Karen was the Chief Learning Officer for the Canadian tax practice for 9 years. She has been involved in the delivery of all aspects of the CPA Canada In-depth tax program and is a former lecturer for the CPA Canada Income Tax for the General Practitioner course. Karen graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Master of Accounting degree. Karen has been very involved in the community over the years currently serving as a member of the Board of the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony Association and the Treasurer at Orchestras Canada. Prior community involvement has included the Board of Governors at the University of Waterloo and United Way of Cambridge and North Dumfries.