CRA call centres gave auditors wrong information as often as 87 per cent of the time: AG

OTTAWA — Despite hundreds of millions of dollars of investments since a devastating 2017 audit, the Canada Revenue Agency’s call centres are still plagued with worsening reliability and accuracy problems as agents give wrong information as often as 87 per cent of the time.

That’s according to a new report by Auditor General Karen Hogan published on Tuesday. The audit found that Canadians are waiting far too long on hold to speak to an agent and, when they get through, they often receive inaccurate general information.

“I’m worried that despite a new telephony system and other improvements, Canadians still wait too long to get answers to their questions on tax,” Hogan told MPs on the Public Accounts committee.

On average, Canadians waited over 31 minutes to speak to an agent last fiscal year, more than double the agency’s service standard of a 15-minute wait, her audit found.

“When those people were able to speak to an agent, they frequently received inaccurate responses,” Hogan added.

One remarkable finding is that the CRA’s call centre gave auditors inaccurate information 87 per cent of the time when they called asking for general individual tax information.

Enquiries about general benefits or business taxes fared only slightly better, with auditors receiving accurate responses roughly half the time.

The finding is in stark contrast to the agency’s own numbers. Since 2019, CRA has reported call accuracy and quality rates of over 87 per cent.

Hogan’s report found that accuracy rates jumped significantly on calls with account-specific inquiries, hitting up to 98 per cent.

But call center employees largely don’t have to fret about losing their job if they provide inaccurate information to taxpayers. That’s because the audit discovered that only 10 per cent of their performance review is related to accuracy.

The bulk of agent performance scores, Hogan says, are related to if they take their breaks and show up to work on time.

“Having only about 10% of an agent’s annual performance review based on the accuracy and completeness of their responses, in my mind, does not encourage a good culture where accuracy and completeness is top of mind,” Hogan told MPs.

Hogan said she also found so many red flags in the 2015 contract between the government and IBM for call center telephony services at CRA and two other departments that she will launch a standalone audit on the contract.

Her report found that the cost of the contract ballooned from a minimum guaranteed amount of $50 million to over $190 million.

In 2017, then-Auditor General Michael Ferguson revealed that the agency’s call centres blocked half the calls they received in order to say it met its service standard for wait times. He also concluded that taxpayers were given wrong information by agents 30 per cent of the time and that a large majority (64 per cent) of calls ultimately went “unanswered.”

In response, the Liberals committed $50 million to improve the call centre’s services and telephone systems and promised that Canadians would start seeing an improvement by 2018. In the meantime, the CRA dropped its service standard from 80 per cent of calls being answered within two minutes to answering 65 per cent of calls within 15 minutes.

Seven years later, the minister responsible for the CRA says the quality of service offered by agency’s call centres has hit “rock bottom” and is “completely unacceptable”.

“It can’t get much worse than it is now,” the secretary of state responsible for the CRA Wayne Long told CTV last month. This summer, the government gave CRA 100 days to improve their services to Canadians.

The Liberals also promised an additional $400 million in the 2022 Fall Economic Statement to support the agency’s contact centres in that fiscal year and the next. The money, according to CRA, would allow the agency to “support the service standard of answering 65 per cent of calls within 15 minutes or less”.

But Hogan’s audit shows that both the number of contact centre employees and the percentage of calls answered within 15 minutes or less dropped between 2022-2023 and 2023-2024, raising questions about if that money was ever spent and, if so, how.

In June, CRA’s data showed that only five per cent of calls met the agency’s service standard.

“Since 2019–20, the agency has met its service standard only once — in the 2022–23 fiscal year,” reads the audit. “This shortfall limits callers’ access to an agent and compromises the agency’s ability to uphold its commitment stated in the Taxpayer Bill of Rights that callers have the right to complete, accurate, clear, and timely information”

Hogan says there is a link between the number of employees at the call centre and the agency’s responsiveness by phone. Call centre employee numbers have dropped progressively since 2022-2023, and so have the agency’s service standard rates.

Some issues highlighted in 2017 appear to have been addressed. Notably, the agency only blocks a small fraction of the calls it receives now (48,000 of over 32 million calls in 2024-2025).

National Post

cnardi@postmedia.com

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