10/21/2025
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.
That aligns with the CRA's own data, which shows it took 31 minutes on average to reach an agent for the tens of millions of callers each year — twice the time it took the year before and a sign that standards are slipping and service is getting worse.
CRA call centres also deflected some 8.6 million calls last year, which means many customers were not even given the option to speak to an agent. That figure is a lot higher than the 1.4 million calls that were deflected the year prior.
As a result, customer complaints about the CRA have soared with the auditor general finding a 145 per cent spike between 2021-22 and 2024-25, despite the agency's claim that some 77 per cent of callers who answer a survey are satisfied with their experience.
The AG is recommending the CRA figure out a better system to triage calls related to issues with the agency's online portal, MyAccount. Many calls are related to being locked out of that digital system and its tying up agents, the report found.
Taxpayers are spending hours on hold with the CRA — despite repeated promises of faster service (new window)
Perhaps the auditor general's most troubling 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.
The AG found that the CRA spent little time or effort on improving the accuracy: there was just 2,200 hours of coaching, feedback or training in 2024-25, which is under 30 minutes per agent annually.
The auditor general also found that the CRA is not getting the full value of its contract with IBM, which handles the telephony services. When AG analysts dialled through to test the system, they were not provided with the expected real-time updates on their queue position, which left callers waiting with no idea how long it would be before reaching an agent.
Canadians are trusting the Canada Revenue Agency to provide answers to their tax and benefit questions that are accurate and complete. Errors in taxes and missed deadlines can be costly to taxpayers, Hogan said.
Source:
John Paul Tasker · CBC News
