Canada Revenue Agency Call Centres Likely to Struggle With Wait Times This Tax Season

The Canada Revenue Agency headquarters in Ottawa in a file photo. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

While the government has invested millions in Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) call centres in recent years, taxpayers still only have a 50–50 chance of talking to a live agent within 15 minutes, according to an agency report.

In 2020–2021, wait times often exceeded an hour during peak periods, or more than three hours to reach specialized agents, according to a 2022 briefing for the minister of national revenue. Only 33 percent of calls were answered within the target service standard of 15 minutes.

The government made investments, building on a $206 million commitment made in 2018, to hire more staff and upgrade call centre capacity ahead of 2022. CRA was able to boost service to have 54 percent of calls answered within 15 minutes, according to a recently published report on service standards for 2022 viewed by Blacklock’s Reporter.

That’s still short of CRA’s 65 percent goal. The report did not say how often errors occurred. In 2017, CRA agents gave wrong information to callers 30 percent of the time, according to an Auditor General report.

CRA has been working for years to remedy problems highlighted in that 2017 report. The Auditor General found, for example, that CRA blocked half of the calls it received, about 29 million, because it couldn’t handle the volume. Only about 30 percent of calls reached a live agent, with 14 percent going to automated self-service options.

“Each caller made an average of three or four call attempts per week. Even after several attempts, some callers did not always reach an agent or the automated self-service system,” the report says. “This finding matters because taxpayers need timely access to accurate information to help them prepare their tax returns and to ensure that their benefits are correct.”