March 2025 Poll

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.

By Leah Manley on March 07, 2025

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 EFILE, 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.

By Denne Ahlefeld CPA CGA on March 06, 2025

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.

By Martin on March 06, 2025

I thought last year was bad.  This year, I have 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 Robert on March 06, 2025

Plleeese make me stop laughing.  Surely you jest in asking such an absurd question.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ...

By Sandra Clark on March 05, 2025

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.

By Beckie D on March 05, 2025

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.

By Deborah Bennett on March 05, 2025

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 Reassessmets 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 Accont” and had no record of them. Difficulties signing into CRA represent a client site.

By Cliff on March 05, 2025