The Globe and Mail
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The Canada Revenue Agency is looking for ways to make it easier for Canadians to get answers to their tax questions without dialling into one of its call centres. Its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot is meant to do just that.
First launched during the 2025 tax season, the bot works similarly to ChatGPT, Gemini and other chats backed by large language models. It looks like a round robot face floating in the bottom right corner of some CRA webpages. Click on it, and you’ll open up a dialogue box where you can type your tax queries.
Yes, AI can help you with your taxes – if you know how to use it
The bot has evolved significantly over the past year. It can now handle questions about individual taxes and benefits, as well as businesses, trusts and charities. But while other AI tools draw from across the web to answer your tax questions, the CRA’s bot only relies on government-provided information.
Still, the CRA cautions that the bot’s answers may not be “fully accurate.” Taxpayers use information generated by the chat at their own risk, warns one of the agency’s web pages.
So, how well does the bot work?
The Globe and Mail asked a tax expert to put it to the test. Joseph Devaney is a chartered professional accountant and director of financial education platform Video Tax News. He quizzed the CRA’s bot on a variety of questions about individual and business taxes, with topics ranging from basic to complex.
Here’s how it went.
Overall, ‘it’s pretty good’
All in all, Mr. Devaney’s assessment was positive. The bot provided helpful answers to a number of questions, and it makes for a much faster alternative compared to calling the CRA, he said.
But Mr. Devaney also spotted some issues. Often, the bot gave incomplete answers. For example, on a question about whether a newcomer to Canada has to file a tax return, the chatbot listed the main reasons why that might be the case, such as having to pay taxes and wanting to claim benefits.
But the bot missed a few other circumstances in which a new immigrant might have to file, such as having sold property or investments.
It can make mistakes and give different answers to the same prompt
During nine conversations Mr. Devaney had with the bot about different tax topics, the bot gave one answer that was plainly wrong.
Mr. Devaney told the chat he had a corporation with a tax year ending on March 31 of this year and asked when he had to file a tax return and pay taxes for the business. The bot had the filing date right but the payment deadline wrong.
When The Globe gave the bot the same prompt a few minutes later, the chat produced the right answer for both the filing and the payment deadline.
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CRA spokesperson Nina Ioussoupova said by e-mail that the chatbot may generate different responses even when it receives the same prompt because it conducts a different real-time search for answers every time a question is asked.
Ms. Ioussoupova also said the CRA was unable to independently reproduce the error. In its testing following The Globe’s inquiry, the bot provided accurate responses.
The bot struggles with vague questions
One of the trickier questions Mr. Devaney asked the chatbot was: “I heard that being on title of my parents’ bank account may mean that I have to file some kind of tax return. Is this true?”
If your name is on an asset that doesn’t really belong to you – for example, if you are listed on a joint bank account with your elderly parents to help them manage their bills – you may have created what’s called a bare trust. And because of recent rule changes, these informal arrangements sometimes require filing a trust return.
Mr. Devaney wanted to see whether the bot would bring up the new issue of trust reporting. It didn’t.
By comparison, when Mr. Devaney put the same question to ChatGPT, he received an answer that included a mention of the new rules on bare trusts.
Ms. Ioussoupova said prompting the CRA’s bot with broad questions that lack context can result in incomplete answers.
She added that the agency is working on getting the bot to ask clarifying questions when it receives these generic prompts.
“In this particular example, the chatbot could ask whether the individual is the true owner of the account or controls the income as the beneficial owner, allowing it to provide a more accurate and complete response,” she said.
Explainer: Income taxes 101: How to file in Canada before the April 30, 2024 deadline
The bottom line
The bot can make mistakes or fail to give necessary context, but so can CRA call-centre agents, Mr. Devaney said.
And it’s likely easier to spot an incomplete answer in an AI chat than in a customer-service conversation over the phone, he added.
“If you’re calling somebody, you’re not sure what they’re looking at and they might have missed or skipped over something that was important and not realized it,” he said. “Whereas if you’re using this chatbot, you can see everything in front of you and you can dig down where you want to.”
Still, as with any AI tool, Canadians should take the CRA’s chatbot’s answers with a grain of salt, he said.
“Probably more than a grain,” he added. “A pebble of salt.”
