Public Accounts Committee on Nov. 30th, 2017

[Bob Hamilton]

Rather than setting a specific new service standard, we're doing two things.

We're trying to increase the transparency of what's going on. I mentioned trying to not only provide a more comprehensive picture of how quickly we're answering when somebody gets through but also provide a picture of how many people are getting through. We're focusing on that transparency. We took the first step in the departmental results report. We hope to improve very soon—as early as next month—our reporting on the website on that. Increased transparency is step one.

We did have an experiment, if you like, to see how changing the wait time, making it a bit longer and letting more people through, would play out in terms of customer satisfaction. So far, it looks as if we're getting some positive results. We'll probably continue to have a little bit of flexibility on the wait time as we go forward.

In terms of a new service standard, once we get the new technology and are able to tell people upfront what their wait times will be, we'll be operating the business in a slightly different way. I think that may give rise to a different kind of service standard. We'll see what that looks like.

At the moment, my focus is more on making sure we're trying to do the best job we can and on being as transparent as we can about telling Canadians what they can expect and what we're delivering. Then I think at the time of the new technology early next year, we'll be revisiting—

[Shaun Chen, Liberal, Scarborough North, ON]

I'm going to stop you there, because I have only so much time, Mr. Hamilton. I heard in your answer that essentially there is no set service standard in the way that you have set it before. You talked about new technology. You talked about transparency. To me, this is transparent enough. There's a report here that tells you very clearly what is going wrong. Frankly, I think the most important thing you can do is set a new service standard and then work towards achieving it. Right now the service standard applies only to the calls that get through, and there are many calls that do not even get to an agent. The Auditor General points out very clearly that only one-third of calls reached an agent, based on the information available.

You talked about new technology. From your departmental action plan, I can see you have technology that will route the calls differently and will allow callers to receive more information about their wait times. But quite frankly, I am a bit confused. You said earlier that you're not surprised by the Auditor General's report and that you don't wait around for the Auditor General to issue a report before you do anything. In your action plan, however, you say you're only developing a “new approach to training and evaluating agents” in the first quarter of this fiscal year, whereas you already had this information, and you know what the lack of service has been during the past five years. It's made very clear in the Auditor General's report. In section 2.39, the Auditor General states, “we also found that other assessors had encountered similar error rates over the past five years”.

So for five years you've had information about callers not getting the right information on average 30% of the time. You say you're not surprised and that you don't wait around for the Auditor General's report, yet you're only now starting to have a “new approach to training”. How does this make any sense?

[Bob Hamilton]

On the access side, we've adjusted our system to allow more people to get through. This means that the people who get through might have to wait a bit longer. Although the wait times have increased a little bit, we are seeing about 50% of people getting through. I'm not saying that's perfect or the end of the story, but it's better than the results we would have seen during the time that the Auditor General looked at it. That's something we're doing now in advance of the technology. Once the technology comes in, we'll be able to give people a sense of the wait times, and we may not get any busy signals, or very few. That will be a different world, but we're taking action now.

As for our training system, every agent gets six weeks of training when they go through. This is something we look at on a continuous basis. We check whether we're seeing any issues and whether we need to make adjustments. We have recently made significant changes that we're rolling out. As Frank mentioned, we have a new gating process for how agents get into being on the lines, as well as a new nesting function whereby they work together to improve. We are making improvements right now before the technology comes. We didn't decide after the Auditor General's report to invest in new technology—that decision was taken, it's in train, and it will arrive next year.

It's something we have to improve on. I don't think I could be clearer with the committee or in our action plan that we need to improve, and we think we have a plan to do so.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Nuttall.

[Alex Nuttall, Conservative, Barrie—Springwater—Oro-Medonte, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Chair, there aren't very many occasions on which there is a very negative audit, the department comes in, and the perception of the department goes down, but this is one of those. I feel like I'm sitting in an episode of Yes, Prime Minister or Yes Minister, for those who know what I'm talking about, and I feel like the overall attitude from CRA is kind of laissez-faire, “I don't care”, “It just is what it is.”

I'll use this analogy to our friends at the CRA. You keep saying “technology”, and it's like driving a car, crashing it, and saying, “Well, we just needed a new car”, and that is not what's needed. The driver needs to be better trained. There needs to be an entirely new culture. Technology can drive efficiencies, it can be a product, it can be a core to a process, it is a sector of our economy—it is not a culture. This is a culture issue.

If it weren't a culture issue, we wouldn't have tables here in this report—and I know these are showing how bad it is—and the best on these four tables is showing a 52% incorrect response. You couldn't even hit 50%. It's mind-boggling that we're now talking about technology. I don't want to hear about technology. We're going to hear enough about technology with Phoenix.

I want to hear what culture change is going to take place within this department, within the entire CRA.

It is no secret that this is a bit of a rat's nest, and I want to understand what's going to change so that my constituents and the constituents of every member of Parliament who sits in this place are not going to be coming to us complaining about all of the issues we get complaints about all of the time. Our job is to ensure you're coming to us. When you've come today to try to show accountability and transparency, and you're saying, “We're going to be transparent, and we're going to get technology, and we're going to institute training changes”, that is not good enough.

I can't believe that we've had access to this report now for two weeks, and it's been publicly produced. I'm not sure how long you've had access to this report, but this is not good enough. I don't even have a question, because I just don't think you can answer any of them. It is that bad. I don't understand where this is going. I'm not even sure what we ask to come back to in a year except to say, “Okay, is your incorrect response rate now at 50% instead of 84% on this one question?”, or “Is it now at 25% instead of 52%?” I'm not even sure where we go, because what's going to happen next year is that you're going to say, “Well, we instituted the technology but it takes about six to 12 months for it to get through the system.” We're going to be three years down the road and we're still going to have these crappy results coming out of CRA, and it needs an entire culture change, not a new piece of technology.

That's all I have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Nuttall.

We'll now move to Ms. Shanahan, please, and then Mr. Christopherson.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I'm afraid that I have to continue on the same line as my colleague, but I am more intrigued by how it did change, because, like my colleague Mr. Lefebvre, I worked in banking and tax services over the last 20 to 25 years. It was common practice for me to sit with my client and say, “Well, let's just call CRA and get to the root of this”, reach an agent within a very short time, get some kind of an answer, and be able to move on.

In fact, at the time, being a Quebecker, I had the additional joy of actually calling Revenu Québec, and at the time it was Revenu Québec that had difficulty answering our questions in a timely manner. And yet about 10 years ago, I noticed that it flipped. We had more trouble getting through to CRA. Revenu Québec had improved immensely.

My question for the Auditor General is to please give us a bit of a historical perspective, because I'm sure this is not the first time you've audited the CRA and its quality and response times. Give us a bit of that. Maybe we can get some of the root causes of this culture change. I agree that it must be incredibly frustrating for the employees, who I'm sure take great pride in their work, to even be giving an inaccurate response in a, “Well, let me just get rid of this call” kind of way. What has changed? Has it been the performance—and I'll ask Mr. Hamilton and his team—and what are the performance indicators that are being used for employees? Has that changed over the years, such that employees are now motivated in a different way when they're answering public calls?

I'll go to the Auditor General first, please.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Go ahead, Mr. Ferguson, please.

[Michael Ferguson]

I believe the last time we looked at this issue was in 1991, so I'd have to go back into all of the details of that.

In the audit that we presented here, we did provide five years of information about the ability of taxpayers to reach an agent, and in 2012-13 it was about 37% and in 2016-17 at 32%. So over the last five years, certainly, the ability of people to reach an agent has been at roughly the same place. Actually, during that time period, in the intervening three years, there were years when it was even worse. In 2015-16, it was only 19% and that improved slightly in 2016-17, but overall, it has been in the range of 37% or less for the last five years.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you.

Go ahead, Mr. Hamilton.

[Bob Hamilton]

I just want to say one thing in response, Mr. Chair. If anybody at the table thinks that these results don't cause us concern at CRA or cause us to know that we have to improve, I just want to correct that notion. I refer to technology because it is going to be an improvement, but to use the driver analogy, we know that we need to train better. We know that we need to take a client-focused approach to this, both in our actions and in our reporting. While this may not be surprising in some sense, because we've seen some of the numbers before on the accessibility side, we know we need to take action. This is very serious for us, and we will be improving.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Sorry, can I just jump in there?

[Bob Hamilton]

I just wanted to say that first off.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Paragraph 2.28 says:

The Agency told us that callers would prefer a busy signal or an automated message to waiting a long time to speak with an agent. However, the Agency had not surveyed callers to verify this assumption.

So if we are going to the client base, are you talking to Canadians about what they're expecting from the CRA? Because it's an honour system, and it works both ways.

[Bob Hamilton]

Yes. We do now have a survey at the end of the call that we're using to get feedback from Canadians. I would say, on the issue of whether we should have longer wait times versus how many people get through the queue, that was looked at, I believe, in 2006 and 2012. The agency did look at it to see if those were still the right choices and chose to stick with the two-minute standard.

We are trying to do even more in the area of getting feedback from clients. If you talk about culture change, we see a few places in the agency where we are trying to change the culture, to think about the client first, not what works for us but what works for the client, and we will be using that to guide our decisions. I can only say that next year, if I come back in front of this committee, I hope to be able to say we are now reporting more transparently on what we've done; we are seeing some results of the better training that we have, hopefully implementing the new technology; and we have better overall call measurement in terms of how many people get through and how long they wait. That's going to be my accountability to this exercise.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Ms. Shanahan.

Go ahead, Mr. Christopherson.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

I'd like to pick up where Madam Shanahan was before I go to my main question.

On page 16 at 2.79, the report shows us:

The Agency's internal analysis found that, on average, in 75 percent of calls that were directed to the automated self-service system, the caller hung up before...listening to the main menu.... Furthermore, our analysis showed that 69 percent of callers who reached the system called back repeatedly until they reached an agent.

Again, you sent people to the self-service system, and 75% of the people hung up; yet, you tell us that you've been listening to what Canadians want. There's a major disconnect there in terms of what you think Canadians want and what Canadians actually want.

At some point, you have to get past this artificiality of picking these things out of I don't know where and start asking Canadians. If you were asking Canadians, you would not have a system where 75% of the people don't like what you're doing in terms of how you're providing that information. It just screams that you're not listening.

I want to go to something, though, that really concerned me. I'm going to come back to this business of the national quality and accuracy learning program, and the fact that on page 14, at 2.67....

I want to tell you that one of the biggest sins a minister can commit is to mislead the House. That is a firing offence. I'm looking at 2.67 and it says, “Overall, we found that the Canada Revenue Agency's public reporting overstated its call centres' results.” In fact, in your departmental results report of 2016-2017, you bragged about a success rate of between 87% and 90%, and that's wrong.

My first question is—and I'd like a quick answer to this—in your next report, are you going to acknowledge that you had wrong information in the previous year's report?

[Bob Hamilton]

What I will say about the next report is that we will provide a more comprehensive view.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's not what I asked, sir. I asked you if you're going to acknowledge that you gave Canadians the wrong information. Are you going to put that in that report, yes or no?

[Bob Hamilton]

I don't believe that we would say we provided wrong information. I believe that we would say we provided some information, and we didn't provide other.

We're not going to wait for next year's report. We're going to start reporting transparently on the overall call centre picture, because some of our measures have not been reflective of what Canadians want to hear. We are taking action, and I think by implication, saying that the reporting we are doing is not complete, and we need to provide a better report.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

That's not accurate. On what you were going to do about things, you went on to say in your report that you're going to expand the information. That's nice. What I'd like to see is you committing to making it accurate. This is a big deal. That's why I started by saying that when a minister stands up in the House of Commons and misleads the House, they get fired.

This agency misled Canadians, and I'm not hearing a good enough mea culpa and what you're going to do about it.

[Bob Hamilton]

I think what you're hearing is that we don't think what we provided is adequate, and we are going to provide more information and better information that's meaningful to Canadians.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

Will you say that much, at least, that the information from the previous year was accurate? Don't just tell me you're going to give more information. That's pretty useless in a world of overloaded information.

[Bob Hamilton]

I would just say that more information can be better, typically, and if we could typically report.... We answered calls within two minutes 80% of the time. That doesn't say anything about how many people didn't get through, so I would call that inadequate information. It's not misleading. It's not inaccurate, but it doesn't tell a part of the story that would be of interest to Canadians.

[David Christopherson, NDP, Hamilton Centre, ON]

It is inaccurate to say your error rate is 6%, and it's actually 30%. You don't think that's misleading? You don't think that's inaccurate?