Canadians have a 50-50 chance of reaching a Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) live agent within 15 minutes, despite giving call centres $206 million for upgrades in the 2018 budget to provide “fewer delays and more timely and responsive services.”. Income Tax .The CRA, in a report Service Standards 2022, said callers dialling its 1-800 lines should expect long waits. .“Our goal is to respond to your call within 15 minutes or less of opting to speak with an agent,” wrote staff..“The Revenue Agency aims to meet this standard 65% of the time. In [the] 2021-2022 fiscal year, 54% of these telephone enquiries were answered within this standard.”.READ MORE CRA workers ready to strike, disrupt tax filings.Troubles with CRA phone services were first documented in a 2017 Auditor General’s report that found taxpayers had only a one-in-three chance of speaking to a live agent after lengthy waits, according to Blacklock’s Reporter..Of 53.5 million calls, 29 million were dropped due to busy signals..Taxpayers typically had to call three times to speak to an agent, wrote auditors..“The Agency did a poor job of providing taxpayers with reasonable access to call centre agents and providing accurate information to those callers,” the Common Public Accounts committee wrote in a 2018 report Call Centres: Canada Revenue Agency..“Alarmingly, although the Agency reported it met its targets for both access and timeliness, its performance measures were incomplete and its call centre results were overstated.”.The latest Service Standards report did not document error rates involving call centre agents. The CRA previously acknowledged it misled Parliament in claiming a 6% error rate. The Auditor General found mistakes ran closer to 29% on average..“Given how deeply this situation affects Canadian taxpayers, the committee was shocked and disappointed to learn of the huge challenge many of them face in merely being able to connect to an agent,” wrote the Public Accounts committee..CRA managers at the 2018 Senate National Finance committee hearings could not explain their inability to improve service..“We’re getting to a point where about half the calls are getting through,” Revenue Commissioner Bob Hamilton testified at the time..“I’m not trying to say it’s perfect.”.“We are focused on improving things today for Canadians who try to reach us by phone and hopefully, in the near future, the technology will help us improve even more,” said Hamilton..“I’m confident that through our action plan, we can and will do better.”.READ MORE NDP MP disagrees with CRA using tax refunds to recover CERB overpayments
