I won't be able to respond to every individual case that you raised here, as you can imagine.
I get some letters myself from taxpayers giving us feedback. I have to be honest and say that more of them are negative than positive. I guess what I would say is that we are striving to provide better service. A couple of the things you referred to are things we are trying to do better, and that's without responding to those cases, because there could be facts that I'm not aware of.
We are trying to make sure that, where we have a piece of information from a taxpayer, we use it. There certainly have been examples in the past where in one part of the organization somebody had information, but somebody else was dealing with the taxpayer and didn't have access to that information. We're trying to fix that. We're trying to think of the agency more as an integrated whole and connecting the silos together. That's one example where we could try to do a better job to make sure that we have the right information.
The second thing is that when we correspond with the taxpayer, making sure that it's respectful correspondence and in some ways helping to educate why we're doing what we're doing. Hopefully, we won't make mistakes. However, if we do, they could be uncovered in a way that's constructive and productive. We are trying to look at our correspondence, look at how we train people.
I would say, on behalf of the 40,000 people who work in the agency, the vast majority of cases are where we can actually help taxpayers. I've sat in on calls with taxpayers where people on the other end are quite stressed because the tax situation is difficult. Our agents have been able to help them through that, to explain that if they're in financial hardship there can be ways to get around it, or here's the explanation for it.
We can do a better job, and that is part of the service mandate we are trying to push for our minister. We can try to minimize the number of mistakes that we make. In a big organization, with all of the returns that we process, there will probably always be some cases, unfortunately. But we are actively trying to improve the service we provide, using the best tools we can, intelligence and technology, and being sensitive in how we communicate.