Video—Call Centres—Canada Revenue Agency

Video Transcript

Every year, Canadians have questions about their taxes. And they turn to the Canada Revenue Agency’s call centres for answers. Unfortunately, we found that getting through to the Agency’s call centres requires persistence, three or four attempts in a given week on average. Based on our testing, the odds of getting a wrong answer is almost 30 %.

According to the Canada Revenue Agency’s own reporting, about 90 percent of callers are connected to either the self-service system or a call centre agent. But when we looked closer, we found the Agency blocks some 29 million calls, more than half its total call volume. These blocked calls get a busy signal, or a message to go to the website or call back later. When you include blocked calls, the Agency’s overall success rate drops from 90 to only 36 percent.

Our team did its own testing. Our test results found that agents gave us wrong information almost 30 percent of the time. The taxpayers will typically not even Know that the information they’ve been given is not right. The Canada Revenue Agency overstated its results. The numbers don’t truly reflect what callers are experiencing.

Under the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, the CRA has committed to provide complete, accurate, clear and timely information to taxpayers. The Agency should assess and improve its performance indicators to better reflect these commitments.