The Canada Revenue Agency’s contact centres provided accurate responses to questions about individuals' taxes only 17 per cent of the time between February and May 2025, the federal auditor general said in a report released Tuesday.

Auditor General Karen Hogan's office placed calls to the CRA's contact centres over four months this year, asking general questions.

The report said the call centres were better suited to addressing business tax or benefits questions, and provided accurate responses to those calls 54 per cent of the time. The report said the "completeness" of responses to those questions was just over 30 per cent.

The report said the call centres were much worse at answering questions about individual taxes. The auditor general estimates the accuracy and completeness of responses to those questions at just 17 per cent.

The report said the CRA seems more concerned with adhering to schedules for shifts and breaks than with the "accuracy and completeness of information they provided to callers."

In a media statement, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said the error rate of CRA call centres proves that "nobody understands the impossibly complicated rules and the government needs to simplify the tax code."

"The Income Tax Act has become so long and complex that virtually no one can understand it," said the federation's federal director Franco Terrazzano. "Hiring more bureaucrats to give even more wrong answers won’t actually fix the problem."

Hogan said there are "lots of opportunities" for the CRA to improve its performance.

"Whether it be the tools that agents have or triaging calls … I think that they could then better train the agents to respond," she said. 

Just 18 per cent of incoming calls this year met the CRA service standard by being answered within 15 minutes, Hogan's report said. Most callers waited an average of 31 minutes, she added.

Marc Brière, national president of the Union of Taxation Employees, said he's not surprised by the report's results, given staffing reductions have meant that remaining employees are working in "poor" conditions.

"This place feels like it's a sweatshop," Brière said, adding that the CRA has lost around 3,000 employees since last year. "The people left behind working are exhausted, their mental health has seriously deteriorated."

Brière said the pressure on workers to answer calls in a timely manner may be affecting the quality of responses.

"They want to answer the calls quick because that's what they have been asked," he said.

Brière said he was surprised by the high rate of incorrect answers reported by the auditor general. He said staff need to receive more ongoing training.

On Sept. 2, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne set a 100-day timeline for the CRA to address call centre delays, with a deadline of Dec. 11.

The CRA said at the time it wanted to answer at least 70 per cent of incoming calls by mid-October.

Melanie Serjak, an assistant CRA commissioner responsible for most contact centres and front-line services to taxpayers, told The Canadian Press last week that its target was surpassed by the beginning of the month.

The agency extended the term contracts for approximately 850 of its call centre agents and rehired a few hundred more.

The CRA also said it's expanding its use of artificial intelligence as part of the 100-day plan to improve services. The agency is extending the hours its online chat service is available and increasing the number of questions its AI chatbot can answer.

Serjak said the AI chatbot being piloted is "much like ChatGPT" and can be used by Canadians to get answers to "some non-account specific questions related to personal taxes and benefits."

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Champagne said the government was "ahead of the curve" on tackling problems at the CRA.

"We saw that coming, we saw that we needed to improve services for Canadians," he said. "We were already ahead of the game by asking that we improve services, that we use technology, that we allocate more people because we want efficiency and at the same time, we want great services for Canadians."

The CRA has used a virtual chatbot, called Charlie, that is not using generative AI. Hogan's report evaluated the accuracy of Charlie's responses and she said taxpayers are more likely to get an accurate response from the chatbot than from an agent.

"Charlie got it right 33 per cent of the time, so that's a little more accurate than reaching an agent and asking them a question about your personal taxes," Hogan said Tuesday. "I think it just highlights that there's a lot of room for improvement."

The report also found the chatbot's responses tended to be brief and offered "limited context and minimal additional information." It was also less accurate than other public web-based conversational artificial intelligence tools.

Tax-Filer Empowerment Canada, a national association representing about a dozen of the country’s leading tax preparation and tax software firms, said in a media statement that the auditor general's report proves that the CRA "has been struggling to pick up the phone for years, and the situation is not getting any better."

"Today, the auditor general is confirming that the status quo is not enough to meet the basic expectations of Canadian taxpayers," the statement read.

"A government which is serious about reducing the size of the public service while improving services to Canadians should challenge our industry to do more rather than relying solely on an agency which has a hard time delivering on its core mandate."

Wayne Long, secretary of state for the Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions, told reporters Tuesday service levels "have not been where they should be." He also said the 100-day plan is showing "spectacular" results so far.

"We've got a lot of room for improvement. We know it, we accept the report and we're going to do better," Long said.

– Alessia Passafiume and Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press