Auditor-General Karen Hogan tabled performance audits in Parliament on Tuesday. One of the reports found a steep decline in Canada Revenue Agency service levels as the agency cut staff over the past few years.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
Federal Auditor-General Karen Hogan sharply criticized the Canada Revenue Agency in a report on Tuesday, saying the agency had answered only 18 per cent of calls from taxpayers in a timely manner in the last fiscal year, a rate far below its own internal goals.
When the Office of the Auditor-General tested the quality of answers provided by the CRA by placing calls to the agency’s call centres, it found that only 17 per cent of general inquiries about individual tax matters received accurate responses.
A steep decline in the CRA’s service levels over the past three fiscal years was closely correlated with staffing reductions at its call centres across the country, the audit found. The watchdog also criticized the CRA for putting little emphasis on the accuracy of answers given by its agents when evaluating their performance.
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In a system that puts the onus on Canadians to provide timely and accurate information to the government through their tax returns, people should expect the tax agency to provide them with timely and accurate information in return, Ms. Hogan told Parliament this morning.
“And what we’re seeing is that that is not the case,” she said.
The report represents the latest scathing public criticism of the CRA’s call centres, after Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced a 100-day plan in early September to fix what he called “unacceptable” delays and other challenges.
The CRA is now rushing to boost its service standards as part of the plan. On Monday, the agency said it is now answering 77 per cent of incoming calls – compared to just 35 per cent in late June and early July – after halting job cuts and ramping up hiring at call centres, among other measures.
But Ms. Hogan painted a troubling picture of how the tax agency has been handling its contact centres.
Her audit focused primarily on how frequently agents were answering calls in a timely manner, rather than on how many calls received an answer at all.
The CRA aims to pick up the phone within 15 minutes of taxpayers calling at least 65 per cent of the time. But since fiscal year 2019-2020, the agency has been able to meet its own service standard only in 2022-2023, a year when the size of its call centre staff peaked at more than 7,000 agents.
Between then and the spring of 2025, though, the agency slashed its contact centre staff, which had dropped to just over 3,500 by the end of May of this year. The agency saw a corresponding collapse in the share of calls it was able to answer within 15 minutes, which has cratered to less than 20 by the end of 2024-2025.
But the number of agents is not the only factor that affects the agency’s capacity to answer calls, Ms. Hogan said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. The report, for example, found that agents spent a significant amount of time looking up answers when addressing general questions about taxes and benefits.
Better training, as well as tools to find information faster, would help reduce wait times, Ms. Hogan said. She also recommended triaging queries related to issues with the CRA’s online portal through a separate system to free up resources to address tax- and benefits-related questions.
The audit contained some data on taxpayers’ calls that went unanswered. In the fall of 2024, the CRA reintroduced the practice of deflecting calls, which is when taxpayers are redirected to self-service options without providing the opportunity to speak to an agent.
In the last fiscal year, the agency deflected 8.6 million calls. More than four million calls were deflected in April of this year alone, a period that saw many Canadians scramble to meet the tax-filing deadline during a tax season marred by technical woes and last-minute tax policy changes.
When callers were able to get through to agents, they would often get inaccurate or incomplete answers, particularly when seeking general information on taxes and benefits, the report found.
Between February and May, staff from the Auditor-General’s office placed 167 calls to the CRA with general tax questions. Just over 54 per cent of calls related to government benefits and business taxes received accurate answers. For inquiries about individual taxes, the accuracy rate was just 17 per cent.
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In general, the report highlighted persistent problems with how the agency handled both call times and accuracy since the Office of the Auditor-General previously reviewed CRA call centre performance in 2017.
Back then, for example, the Auditor-General recommended giving taxpayers information on call wait times so they could decide whether to stay on the line or call back later. But eight years later, the CRA still does not provide callers with real-time updates on their position in the queue, though it does now provide some information about expected wait times, the Auditor-General found.
The Auditor-General also criticized how the federal government handled the contract for the telephone system currently used by CRA.
Ottawa signed a $50-million agreement with IBM in 2015 to provide a phone platform for the tax agency and two other departments. But by 2019, the value of that contract has ballooned to $190-million and is now projected to increase to $214-million through 2027, when the system will be replaced.
The audit found that neither the CRA nor the federal procurement agency that signed the contract had any process to fact-check invoices related to the telephone platform to ensure the vendor had actually provided the services for which it was billing Ottawa.