Evidence of meeting #12 for Public Accounts in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was contract.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
We'll come back to you, I'm sure.
Next is Ms. Tesser Derksen.
You have the floor for five minutes, please.
Liberal
Kristina Tesser Derksen Liberal Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thanks, everyone, for attending today. Welcome back to those who were here last week, and welcome to those who are new—not new but new today.
I want to touch a little bit on the 100-day service improvement plan. I know that it has been recently launched, and it's focusing on increasing contact centre capacity, expanding online self-service options and tackling the root cause of service issues. I understanding that there is a new call-scheduling pilot that's being run as part of that plan. Is that correct?
Ms. Serjak or Mr. Skinner, maybe I'll ask you what the impact of that call-scheduling pilot has been on the service levels that we're seeing now.
Assistant Commissioner, Assessment, Benefit, and Service Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Absolutely, I'm happy to take that.
That is part of the “accelerating service modernization” pillar of our 100-day plan. It gives us the opportunity to experiment with features that we believe would be most impactful for Canadians.
With regard to the call-scheduling one, there are two things that I want to mention there. One is that we have put in place the ability for a Canadian to schedule a callback from the CRA on a topic that is very popular, the disability tax credit. It's a very specific area of focus that will allow us to test whether or not it is serving Canadians' needs, in order to determine whether we want to roll that out to a broader base of topics.
The other thing I will mention is that there's a new functionality through the My Account portal called “Manage balance”; it was launched last Monday. That particular functionality allows a Canadian to schedule a callback related to payments that they may need to make to the CRA. That has been hugely popular since its launch last week. I believe we have received over 10,000 requests for scheduled callbacks. We are monitoring that very closely to help inform, from a business intelligence standpoint, what this could mean to other potential callback topics at the agency.
Liberal
Kristina Tesser Derksen Liberal Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON
Okay.
You have received 10,000 requests for callbacks. Do you have a measure of whether the callbacks are happening and how quickly those are being dealt with?
Assistant Commissioner, Assessment, Benefit, and Service Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
The callback is related to the disability tax credit, which is the first that I mentioned. The idea is to call back the Canadian in two business days. It's not a precise time or day or schedule. It's within two business days. Those are happening. I believe that since that was launched at the beginning of September—I don't want to lead you astray—we've had maybe close to a thousand requests for a scheduled callback.
What we're seeing is that Canadians are calling because they want faster resolution of their file. We are offering the callback service to assist them from an eligibility standpoint and from a how-to-apply standpoint. However, it's certainly not necessarily resolving their cases more quickly, which is why we're also making great efforts to tackle root causes, as you mentioned in your question.
Liberal
Kristina Tesser Derksen Liberal Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON
Thanks for that.
It's good news. It sounds like there are still some restrictions and obstacles to quick service and customer satisfaction.
One example I came across when I was working with corporate clients is that small businesses would need company keys. They would get that from a different agency; I don't think it was the CRA. It would be mailed, for example, so if they had changed their business address, they wouldn't get the company key mailed to them, and it would cause a whole kerfuffle and a lot of wasted time.
Can you identify anything like that in your department that is on the board to be dealt with from a digital transformation perspective?
Assistant Commissioner, Assessment, Benefit, and Service Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Absolutely. There are two things that I can speak to that have eliminated the need for a Canadian to call to get a particular code to create their online account in My Account or to have it sent through the mail. It's something called a digital identity validation service, which we launched approximately one year ago to assist Canadians with creating online credentials without having the need to call or receive a code in the mail, and that is leveraging cutting-edge, industry standard artificial intelligence.
Last Monday, we also launched the ability to use that same type of service for Canadians who have been locked out of their account, which was another significant call driver and a very big pain point for Canadians. The whole idea is to resolve those issues as quickly as possible so that Canadians can continue to self-serve online and won't need to call.
Since we launched that service on Monday of last week, we have resolved just over 5,500 lockout requests. Every single one of those could have resulted in a phone call that takes about 10 to 15 minutes for an agent to resolve. It's a very promising feature. Clearly, we're answering the needs of Canadians by deploying that.
Liberal
Kristina Tesser Derksen Liberal Milton East—Halton Hills South, ON
Okay, that's certainly good to hear. It sounds like there are lots of improvements being made in a very short amount of time.
Just to play devil's advocate, I presume that the reason you would mail things to an address would be for concerns surrounding fraud, maybe, and that sort of thing.
Do you foresee any detrimental effects from these changes, and if so, how are you addressing them and planning for them?
Assistant Commissioner, Assessment, Benefit, and Service Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
Fraud is around us at all times, with whatever service channel we choose to utilize. Even with mailing something to someone's address, mail can get lost, or there can be postal disruptions. That is also a vulnerability when we mail secure information to Canadians.
When utilizing online digital tools and leveraging industry standard artificial intelligence, the amount of testing done and the controls that are in place are so that we can detect and also prevent, and then remedy when necessary. It stands to show that there are fraud vectors coming at us all the time in our ecosystem, so we have very solid controls and frameworks in place to deal with that.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you.
I see that is the time. We will come back to you later on.
We are beginning our third round, which will again consist of five members and various times.
We will go to Mr. Stevenson now for five minutes, please.
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Thank you.
Five minutes isn't going to do it for me, but I'll see what I can do here.
As a CPA in public practice for over 26 years, I've seen a lot of changes in the CRA and have seen how it has dealt with fraud, both for taxpayers and tax preparers. I have a few questions here. I'm going to jump all over the board, just because of some of the questions you've answered.
On the last one, you talked about changes with “manage balance”, which is a new feature, and about callbacks. They have had callbacks for corporate questions for quite a long time. I'm not sure why that has not been a feature as much on general tax in the call centre. Can you tell me who makes that decision and why that's never been a choice before?
Assistant Commissioner, Assessment, Benefit, and Service Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
On the general inquiries line, there is the opportunity—and there has been for quite some time—to request a callback. That happens when we have enough capacity and availability to respond to Canadians on the same day.
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
If you don't have the capacity, though, they get hung up on. They were.
Assistant Commissioner, Assessment, Benefit, and Service Branch, Canada Revenue Agency
That, I can't confirm, if someone was hung up on—
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
I've had it happen several times, where you call in and hear, “We're too busy, sorry. Call back later”, versus staying on hold.
I'll go back to the question. Last week, you talked about how part of that was probably because they didn't want taxpayers sitting on hold for a long time. This may not be your answer, either, but who is responsible? Is it CRA, or is it with Shared Services, on determining...? We've talked a lot about the requirements. Who's responsible to say that if it's 30 minutes, that's too long, and they should have more people?
If it's 30 minutes for them to wait on hold, or hours, which it was in the past, who's responsible to say that they need more agents online? Was that in the contract for Shared Services, or is that for CRA to say that they need to improve the service levels? Who is seeing those levels? It sounds like Shared Services is seeing the service levels, but CRA is the one saying that they need more people.
It seems to me that you guys need to talk together a little more. Who's responsible for those?
President, Shared Services Canada
Our responsibility, for Shared Services, is to ensure that the service is available, no matter how many call centre agents are there. Whoever is the consumer of the service is responsible for staffing that.
In our case, we use this contract for our helpdesk service. It's our job to make sure that Shared Services has the people to answer the helpdesk calls that we have, to meet our service standards.
In the case of CRA, I'll turn it over to CRA.
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
CRA, then, is telling you what the service level is, and you're responsible for the number of agents to meet that service level.
President, Shared Services Canada
No, we just provide the base. We make sure that the base service is there, according to the contract, and then it's in CRA's hands.
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Okay, then I'll do one extension from that. If the service quality is not up, then it's back to CRA to say that the answers are not being.... It has nothing to do with Shared Services. They're not the ones making the determination as to whether the answers are correct, either. It's all up to CRA, then, to make those determinations.
I think it was Mr. Jones who said that there were improvements in the contract. Can we have a detailed definition, as to the new contract, of what is improved in the new contract versus the old one? It is probably best for us to get that in writing, because you said there were multiple changes. For us to find a bunch of those, it's difficult on that part.
Did you want to respond as to whether you can get that for us?
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
Okay. It's better to have it verbally than just a head nod.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
So that will come in writing, then. Is that right?
You kind of left us hanging there for a second, Mr. Stevenson.
Does that work for you and your team, Mr. Jones?
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you.
It's back to you, Mr. Stevenson. You have just over 30 seconds.
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
I guess I'll take a bit of a selfish stab at one here. To me, in the process of trying to prevent fraud, the systems that have changed have limited tax preparers' situations. How do you see them fitting in to help you as a tool for CRA? It doesn't appear that you've considered them a lot, whereas taxpayers often rely on their accountants and whoever else is helping them. You've limited them significantly in terms of how they can get new people in to help them.