CRA Service Levels Rate Poorly in Advisor Poll

Over 96% of advisors surveyed in last month’s Knowledge bureau Report poll said that despite ramping up various initiatives and staffing levels, CRA’s service levels have worsened significantly and the commentary around this was interesting.  For the few who said yes, there were no specific embellishing comments, but for those who said no, there was a lot of scathing detail.  Take a look:

From Klaus Theyer:  Based on my 47th year of tax preparation this year’s uncertainty tops the last three years, or at least it is equally bad.  The CRA has become such an uncaring institution towards taxpayers, and with the likelihood of another Liberal government I don’t expect any changes. Having said that, I have not heard from any political party that they are planning to review Canada’s Revenue Agency.

From Al Scherbarth Professional Corporation:  I have been dealing with CRA for over 45 years. CRA has become totally dysfunctional in recent years! Responses to simply enquiries can take up to a year and most complex cases and audits can be drawn out for years! Can’t understand most of the agents and this compounded with “working from home” wastes countless hours and is costly as well, as it does not allow a taxpayer to do any planning going forward because of unsettled audits and queries from the past.

CRA’s online services are as slow as molasses and if you phone you can rest assured that you may be on the line for hours, after which calls are dropped because agents are using a cell phone from home.  Agents are not knowledgeable. . .auditors do not how to efficiently perform an audit and use a shotgun approach requesting information that is not relevant. I have absolutely no confidence in the present bureaucratic CRA!

From Pat Gamborg.   As I have stated on another forum, the recent phishing scam supposedly from Efile does not exist according the Sudbury Centre.  Even the higher ups have declined my request for new password since there is no scam and therefore no problem.  Two days later I get an email that is really from CRA warning about the scam.  Great communication. 

CRA has the worst customer support anywhere and I think it is because they do not train their staff properly.  But not to worry.  I read that CRA is laying off over 400 employees this month.  That should help tremendously with wait times.

From Leah Manley.  I am finding getting through by phone almost impossible from March to November as well as finding an agent that is knowledgeable about the questions/situation you have called about. I have had one client waiting for 2 years now for an interest relief decision and when I phoned the agent could see that the application was acknowledged but he couldn’t do anything. He said to call the number on the acknowledgement letter which I did twice now. Both times it goes to “voicemail” and indicates that you need to leave a message with the Reference number and they would call back.  It has now been 2 months and neither myself or my client has received a call. 

On another occasion I was told that in no way can you complete and adjustment for a Trust online and that is why it hadn’t been processed and the next agent indicated that you could and that she could see the submission and didn’t know why it hadn’t been processed yet.  It has now been 8 months and so far no results even though she said she would flag the file.  The only good thing is you can look up the wait times online and if it exceeds 30 minutes there is no sense in calling as you won’t be put in the cue.

From Martin in March.  CRA and improvement are two words that don’t go together.  Wait times for phone calls are still long. Had to hang up several times,  after holding for over an hour, to get to other scheduled items.  Hard to get meaningful answers. With the exception of one agent, who acknowledged that CRA should have responded to my request by mid December, and she sent a memo on January 27th to the department that deals with the issue I wrote about. So far no response again.

From Robert in March:  I thought last year was bad.  This year, I have wait times averaging 2 hours.  Sometimes I need to hang up because it is taking too long and try again the next day or so.  I also agree some agents do not seem to know how to solve the issue presented to them. All this after the current government spent millions on “beefing up” the tax department, handing out nice raises, and hiring hundreds, if not thousands, of new agents.  Surely it was money well spent, not.  Our CRA is broken.

By Beckie D.   Most agents at the call centers have no clue what is going on. They receive extremely poor training and I am assuming, even poorer support from management. Anything beyond a “basic” question, they will not be able to answer. After having major issues with submitting T4’s on behalf of clients, I spoke with 4 different agents and none of them had a clue how to fix the problem. I was able to find the work around for this issue on Reddit by reading 100’s of comments from other bookkeeper’s having the same issue.  Amazing…. one person posting on Reddit was able to fix an issue that no CRA agent could understand or fix.

From Deborah Bennett.   There isn’t any service and seems to be people at a call centre that don’t understand what you are asking.  No one that is knowledgeable unless you wait 3 hours to get transferred to someone that eventually might have the answer.  Often they just send you a link with
no direction or definite answer to the question/problem.

From Cliff:  It seems that CRA “My Account” continues to not have slips in the system that sometimes clients have their copies but CRA has not got those in the system. I found that in some cases clients would get Reassessments in the fall for missing slips. Yet in my files I have printouts of the slips that I obtained for my clients through represent a client “My Account” and had no record of them. There are also difficulties signing into CRA Represent A Client site.

Last word goes to Denne Ahlefeld CPA CGA.   Before this tax season’s closing of the T4/T5 system it was very simple to EFILE one of these slips.  I trained my staff how to do EFILE in the Fall of 2024.  When the system reopened in January 2025, it was not the same system, it was not the same process, and we had numerous issues with the system before we finally figured it out.  Since we file many different forms in our office we have two Web Access Codes, so that created an issue with EFLING slips with the CRA. 

The next issue was that CRA’s “Confirmation” notice is useless.  It does not show on their which corporation you just EFILED, nor the type of slip that was EFILED.  Prior to December 1, 2024, the confirmation would say Bob Smith Consulting Ltd. 2024 T4.  So you knew exactly who you filed.  Now the information is not there, it is like we took a step back in time instead of going forward. That topped with the issues with the capital gains inclusion rates and the delays that CRA has caused our tax software it is going to be a VERY long and frustrating tax season for us.

Thanks to all who participated.  Our next poll is this:

Do you believe our tax system needs to be reformed and if so, what would be your first improvement? If not, what do you like about it?