No, the CRA will ‘never’ answer 100% of your calls, administrator says

CTV’s Scott Hurst has an update on results of the Canada Revenue Agency’s 100-day review that doubled the number of calls answered.

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is “proud” after its “100-day Service Improvement Plan” doubled the number of unique calls answered from just 35 per cent to more than 70 per cent, but officials say they “will never be in a position to answer 100 per cent” of calls.

While committing to maintain that 70 per cent, Melanie Serjak, the CRA’s assistant commissioner of the Assessment, Benefit and Service Branch, said since they receive more than 30 million calls a year, “that number is just not sustainable to maintain at 100 per cent call answer level.”

“That is actually a very normal operational kind of a balance, so to speak, when it comes to contact centre operations that are being operated in a very fiscally responsible, and somewhat restrained way,” Serjak told reporters in a briefing.

At best, at some points, the agency answered as many as 92 per cent of calls on a weekly basis, made possible through the extension of contracts and rehiring 1,250 employees.

The 100-day plan focused on four priorities: improving call response, expanding digital self-serve tools, fixing root problems and modernizing services.

“While there is still a lot of work to do, we are proud of the progress we have made,” Serjak said.

Many of the steps taken involve ways to help Canadians get information without having to call the CRA.

Maxime Guénette, assistant commissioner of the Service, Innovation and Integration Branch, said he is “very proud” of the progress, noting that unique callers dropped by 11 per cent, or 223,000 fewer calls, which he attributes to the efforts especially to move to digital.

The 100-day review was mandated in response to significant delays Canadians experienced with the agency.

In September, Secretary of State Wayne Long, who oversees the CRA, was blunt in his assessment of the agency in an interview on CTV Power Play last September.

“We hit rock bottom. It can’t get much worse than it is now.”

In October, the auditor general released a report showing, in part, call centres only provided accurate responses to general individual tax questions 17 per cent of the time, which the government pushed back on.

CRA shares self-described successes

An example of increased digital self-service: if you lose or forget your CRA sign-in details, you can now get back in online, rather than getting stuck on the phone. The CRA says it can divert about 300,000 calls a year this way, each taking 10 to 15 minutes, if a customer is locked out.

There is also a new “Manage Balance” feature that lets you make payments online without speaking to an agent – used 23,000 times so far.

And the agency says its GenAI chatbot has gotten better, now able to answer more complex questions. Canadians have used the chatbot 240 per cent more than this time last year. In general, the CRA plans to use more AI and automation going forward.

More than 59,000 Canadians used a new scheduled callback program for issues related to account access or online business registration.

In another example of what the CRA considers to be success, at the beginning of the 100 days, the processing time for the Canada Child Benefit was 19 weeks. It’s now 13 weeks.

Processing time for the Disability Tax Credit also shrank, going from 15 weeks to 11 weeks.

Guénette acknowledges those times are “still in excess of our service standards,” and hopes they are brought down further by the beginning of the busy tax-filing season.

In terms of modernizing, the CRA gives the example of payment-related questions that now go right to specialists, avoiding 95,000 phone transfers annually.

When asked whether any other services had to be cut back to compensate, Guénette didn’t provide a clear response.

“It’s less a matter of, you know, not doing or, you know, dropping,” said Guénette. “It’s a matter of being able to recalibrate our efforts.”

CRA unclear on future job cuts

Officials noted about $5 million was spent for the service feedback program. However, they were murky on potential costs of rehiring extra staff and extending contracts at contact centres.

“We’re really leveraging automation when it comes to manual tasks, like robotic process automation that can be delivered at a lesser cost, and also allows us to find the efficiencies so that we can make these types of reallocations,” said Serjak.

With the busy tax-filing season ahead, Serjak says the agency will “be implementing dozens more additional improvements.”

Hiring and rehiring is happening right now to bring centre staff to 4,500 — on a temporary basis — during the tax season, up from 3,300, they added.

“The service experience should be improved this tax-filing season over last tax-filing season,” said Serjak. Last year, the CRA received as many as 300,000 calls a day during tax season.

“We don’t want to proclaim victory too soon by any stretch of the imagination, because we know that even with that number of agents on the phone this filing season, there will be times where we may not meet that 70 per cent service level,” they added, repeating that the level of calls the agency receives is not sustainable.

And throughout all these improvement efforts, CRA staff don’t know whether their jobs are on the line. In the face of government-wide cuts, officials briefing reporters couldn’t say whether cuts are coming – just that nothing is planned between now and January.

“Decisions that stem from the comprehensive expenditure review announcements made in Budget 2025 are still being made at the agency level,” said Guénette. “We’re not in a position to tell you right now … whether there are cuts planned and when they might be.”

“We intend on continuing the work and the efforts leading to filing season with the same goal of intensity and velocity that we’ve applied during the 100-day plan,” he added.