If you have ever laid someone off on a Monday and not filed the Record of Employment until the following Tuesday, you are not alone. You are however out of compliance. Service Canada gives you five calendar days. That is it.
The ROE is the single most consequential piece of paperwork in a Canadian offboarding. It decides whether the former employee gets EI, how much, and how quickly. It also decides whether Service Canada flags your next few ROEs for extra scrutiny. Small businesses tend to treat the ROE as a form to be filled out when someone has time; Service Canada treats it as a regulated filing with a hard deadline. That disconnect is where the trouble lives.
Below is a table that I like to reference when it comes time to file an ROE. Having the reason codes handy has saved me on more than one occasion. Picking the right one is the difference between a clean filing and a phone call from an adjudicator.
| Code | Use for | Traps |
|---|---|---|
| A00 | Shortage of work / end of contract / end of season | Use this for layoffs. Do not default to K when you mean A. |
| D00 | Illness or injury | Use when the employee is off for medical reasons even if they haven't formally quit. |
| E00 | Voluntary resignation (quit) | Employee ineligible for regular EI. Do not use if they quit "with cause" — see K00 with an explanation. |
| F00 | Maternity leave | Triggers EI maternity benefits. Keep F00 and P00 distinct. |
| G00 | Mandatory retirement | Rare now that mandatory retirement is largely gone; do not use for "ordinary" retirement at 65. |
| H00 | Work-sharing | Only if you have an active Work-Sharing agreement with Service Canada. |
| K00 | Other (explanation required) | The most abused code. Anything that fits A, E, M, or N should NOT be coded K. |
| M00 | Dismissal for misconduct | Employee ineligible for EI. Has to meet the legal bar for "misconduct" — not "we let them go." |
| N00 | Leave of absence | Unpaid leave not covered by D, F, P, or Z. |
| P00 | Parental leave | Triggers EI parental benefits. Separate from F00. |
| Z00 | Compassionate care or family caregiver | Triggers the EI special benefit. Commonly missed and coded K. |
Two things jump out to me here. K00 is a catch-all that Canadian employers reach for too often. If the situation fits another code, use that code. E00 (quit) and M00 (dismissed for misconduct) both disqualify the employee from regular EI, which is exactly why they are the two codes the adjudicator will scrutinize hardest.
That table looks tidy. The mistakes that follow are not.
The three mistakes Service Canada sees most
Mistake 1 — Missing the five-day window. The ROE is due within five calendar days of the last day worked (or the end of the pay period, whichever gives you less time — for monthly payroll the rule is stricter). Five days is short, and it runs from the interruption of earnings, not from when HR gets around to the paperwork. The penalty for a late ROE is not a fine in most cases. The penalty is that your former employee cannot start an EI claim, their rent is due on the first, and they now have a reason to call Service Canada with your name attached. Service Canada has a record of every employer's filing timeliness, and the pattern compounds.
Mistake 2 — Picking K00 when the real code is something else. "Other" feels safe when the situation is ambiguous. It isn't. When an employer uses K00 with a vague explanation — "mutual separation," "restructuring," "we decided to part ways", the adjudicator has to decide whether the separation was voluntary or involuntary, and the employee's EI hangs on that decision. If the real code was A00 (shortage of work), the employee gets benefits faster. If the real code was M00 (misconduct), the employer is on the hook for defending that position. K00 moves the decision to an adjudicator who does not know your business. That almost never helps you.
Mistake 3 — Getting Block 15C (insurable earnings) wrong. Insurable earnings include regular pay, overtime premium, vacation pay, statutory holiday pay, and most bonuses. They do NOT include severance, retiring allowances, non-cash taxable benefits, or tuition reimbursements. The common error is either direction: excluding overtime (which understates the employee's EI entitlement and generates a complaint) or including severance (which overstates earnings and triggers a Service Canada correction). Both require you to issue an amended ROE, which creates a record of the error, which affects your filing profile.
What this costs when it goes wrong
A late or incorrect ROE rarely carries a direct penalty for the employer. The cost is indirect and it compounds. A former employee who cannot start an EI claim because your ROE is outstanding will tell others — not in a lawsuit, but in the Glassdoor review and the reference conversation with your next candidate. Service Canada tracks employer filing patterns, and a business with a history of late or corrected ROEs gets reviewed more closely on every future filing, which means more audits, more back-and-forth, more HR time, and a slower experience for future departures.
And if the pattern is bad enough, say repeated K00 abuse, repeated insurable-earnings errors, the integrity services branch can open a broader review. That is when the invisible cost becomes a very visible one.
The fix is not "build a better checklist"
Checklists work when the checker has time and the rules are stable. For ROEs, the rules are specific, the deadline is short, the data inputs live in four different places (payroll for earnings, time tracking for hours, HR for the separation reason, the employee record for the SIN and address), and the person doing the filing is almost always doing three other things at the same time.
You solve this with a system that generates the ROE XML from the offboarding record — pulls the insurable earnings from the last 53 weeks of pay runs, pulls the insurable hours from time tracking, forces the reason code to be picked from the real list with short descriptions next to each option, and triggers a five-day countdown the moment the offboarding is recorded. That is what "built for Canadian compliance" actually means in this specific case.
Hang on to the reason codes in the meantime. And if you are staring at Block 16 at 4:30 pm on day five, trying to decide between A00 and K00 because you did not plan for this, that is the signal.
Related calculators
- Severance Pay Calculator — statutory notice and pay in lieu under every province's Employment Standards Act. The ROE is filed; severance is what you owe alongside it.
- Overtime Calculator — provincial OT rules. Block 15C insurable earnings include overtime premium; get the OT number right before the ROE goes out.