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.