In a recent review, the auditor general’s finding is that tax-filers are often getting inaccurate information from CRA agents.
The auditor general’s office assessed the quality of the test calls it placed and found only 17 per cent of the answers provided to non-account-specific or general questions about individual taxes were accurate — and those sort of calls make up about one-fifth of all calls answered by agents.
The answers to questions about benefits and business taxes were better, but CRA agents still barely received a passing grade, with 56 and 54 per cent of those respective calls determined by the auditor general to be accurate.
In a scathing new report released Tuesday, the auditor general found Canada Revenue Agency contact centres are repeatedly failing to answer calls in a timely manner — and when agents do connect to a customer, they are often providing inaccurate responses.
While the CRA has committed to answering 65 per cent of calls within 15 minutes — a standard that is already much lower than it was in the past — Auditor General Karen Hogan found that just 18 per cent were answered in that time frame in 2024-25. In June, the service offered was even worse: fewer than five per cent of calls were answered within 15 minutes.
The AG’s office placed 167 test calls to the CRA between February and May of this year to assess the agency’s promised response time — the average wait time to reach an agent was nearly 33 minutes. Between time on hold and spent with an agent, the report said it took analysts about 50 minutes on average to get an answer to a query.
