As the Canada Revenue Agency’s highly publicized 100-day plan to reduce delays reaches its end date, the agency says it has doubled the number of answered calls for assistance, but admitted some Canadians still face long waits for benefits.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne introduced the plan in September, after calling Canadians’ troubles in accessing assistance from the tax agency “unacceptable.”
Last year, the CRA received more than 32 million calls, the agency said, peaking at nearly 300,000 a day during filing season.
Mr. Champagne directed the agency to improve call-centre performance, shorten wait times for key benefits and tax credits, and modernize parts of its online services. In late June and early July, the agency was answering just 35 per cent of unique calls.
In an update released early Thursday morning, the CRA said it has more than doubled the number of calls it has answered to 70 per cent, peaking at 92 per cent at the end of October, after extending term contracts and ramping up hiring at call centres.
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However, in the agency’s mid-October progress update on the same plan, it said 77 per cent of calls were answered.
The agency’s goal is to answer 70 per cent of calls and would “never be in the position” to answer 100 per cent of calls, said Melanie Serjak, an assistant commissioner at the CRA, adding that wait times are currently around 30 minutes.
The tax agency has also cut down on its processing times for certain tax credits, but “these processing times are still in excess of our service standards,” Maxime Guenette, an assistant commissioner at the CRA said, adding he hopes they can be improved by the next filing season.
The agency pointed to several service changes that helped reduce call volumes, including allowing people who lose or forget their CRA sign-in information to regain access online without phoning for assistance.
“Account lockouts drive hundreds of thousands of calls every year,” said Ms. Serjak. The tax agency has also implemented an AI-powered chatbot that can answer questions.
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In addition, the agency said it shifted staff to areas with heavy backlogs, such as tax adjustments, disability tax credit applications and Canada child benefit claims, resulting in more than 23,000 additional DTC cases being processed, the agency said.
Demand for the DTC has surged this year, in part because Canadians must qualify for the credit in order to receive the new Canada disability benefit, which began issuing payments of up to $200 a month in July.
The DTC requires extensive medical documentation, and processing times have lengthened as more people apply. Although the CRA’s target for low-complexity cases is eight weeks, it met that standard just 38 per cent of the time in fiscal 2024-25.
Mr. Guenette said the processing time for the Canada child benefit applications has been cut from 19 to 13 weeks, and the disability tax credit went from 15 to 11 weeks.
The CRA said its new system enhancements will allow it to automatically process about 115,000 more tax adjustment requests each year, which is when a taxpayer changes something on a tax return when it has already been filed.
The number of notices of objection filed by taxpayers, used when individuals or businesses believe the CRA has made an error, has nearly doubled since before the pandemic. CRA data provided to The Globe and Mail show objections rose from about 68,000 in 2018-19 to roughly 128,000 in 2024-25.
Looking ahead, the agency plans to roll out additional service improvements, including an updated progress tracker for individuals and businesses and mandatory backup multi-factor authentication to reduce account lockouts and help users verify their identity.
