Public Accounts Committee on Oct. 28th, 2025

[Hugo Pagé]

Unfortunately, I'm going to give you the same answer.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC]

That's very disappointing, Mr. Pagé. That's ridiculous.

I didn't even mention the company's name, and we are going to let the courts deal with the matter. By the way, according to CBC/Radio-Canada, your agency's lawyers are arguing in court that the company in question was not entitled to the refund and that its tactics were questionable, if not fraudulent. That is what's happening in court.

Here in Parliament, our job is to find out how things at the agency work, but it is clear that they aren't working. Therefore, I'm going to give you another chance to explain this to me—but above all, to Canadians. What is the amount or threshold at which an automated review is no longer permitted and a manual review is required? I'm talking about a review conducted by a CRA worker, someone who cares whether Canadians get their money's worth.

[Hugo Pagé]

The threshold varies depending on the risk. The risk level determines the threshold. Unfortunately, I can't reveal the thresholds, so as not to put everything out there for potential fraudsters.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC]

Have it your way, but the matter is being discussed right now in court, on national television and in Parliament.

Is the threshold really $5 million, or just about, because in this case, the transaction was $2,566.28 short of the threshold? Did you become aware of the situation because of that threshold?

I'm going to ask you the question I asked you earlier. Did you adjust the thresholds when you realized that $4.9 million was an outrageous amount?

[Hugo Pagé]

I'm going to give you the same answer. Whenever we identify an instance of fraud, whenever we see that our controls can be tightened up, we adjust the thresholds; we adjust the level of control to reflect the risk.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC]

In the same CBC article, reporter Daniel LeBlanc wrote that sources close to the CRA think “the government needs to hire outside experts to examine the agency’s security measures” and that, according to one source, “the agency cannot police itself”.

Mr. Pagé, you just proved that again. My question to you is very simple: What is the threshold at which a transaction is no longer subject to automated review, triggering a manual review by an agent, someone who wants to do something and who, in one tenth of a second, would have realized that issuing a $4,997,433.72 refund to a business that had $380,000 in revenue was wrong?

[Hugo Pagé]

I'm going to ask my colleague whether he has anything to add.

[Denis Skinner]

There is no world where agents, agency staff, cannot obtain the authorization to access the tools they need.

As for the risk of fraud, highly advanced IT systems provide warnings to employees. A number of factors come into play.

[Gérard Deltell, Conservative, Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk, QC]

Are you serious, Mr. Skinner? You're talking about IT systems that are so highly advanced you didn't even see the red flag go up when a $4,997,433.72 refund was issued. Someone at TD Bank saw the red flag. The people at the CRA want to serve Canadians. Canadians pay taxes in exchange for real services. Luckily, TD Bank caught it, otherwise this fellow would have gotten away with almost five million dollars, as if nothing were wrong. If your IT systems are as highly advanced as you say, how did you get swindled?

[Denis Skinner]

I hope I've understood your question.

Yes, I do consider our systems to be advanced, and they are constantly evolving. We work with hundreds of thousands of business rules within a fairly complex tax system. The benefits management system also has hundreds of thousands of rules. That means numerous variables inform the risk management system that employees can use to determine whether a payment should be issued or not. In certain cases, the process is automated.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you, Mr. Deltell. Sorry, but your time is up. You'll have a chance to ask more questions in the next round.

Next is Mr. Osborne, who will have five minutes.

I'll turn the floor over to you, sir.

[Tom Osborne, Liberal, Cape Spear, NL]

Thank you.

Up to now, we have focused on the more technical aspects of the Canada Revenue Agency and Shared Services Canada. I want to focus a little bit on the other side of the coin. That's probably what matters even more to John and Jane Public: the service they get.

What plans have you put in place to improve the completeness and accuracy of responses by agents?

[Melanie Serjak]

There are two parts to the answer.

One is to share that before an agent gets on the telephone, they go through in-classroom training, anywhere from two weeks to 13 weeks. That's followed by weeks of live training on the phone, which we call “nesting”, and then by gating. The nesting piece is when they're with a more senior agent, a more knowledgeable agent, who gets to listen to their phone calls, and the agent who is nesting gets to ask questions of this senior agent in order to ensure that the completeness, accuracy and quality of their responses are up to par.

As part of our service modernization efforts, what we're doing next is actually looking at artificial intelligence and other technology tools that will assist the agents in providing complete and accurate responses. We are currently working with our vendor in that space to pilot an experiment on which tools would have the highest return on investment for our agents in terms of productivity and also in terms of assisting them in providing the most complete and accurate responses possible. We are also working with Bell in the context of the new contract to ensure that we can accelerate any of those tools as we onboard to the new platform next year.

I hope that's helpful.

[Tom Osborne, Liberal, Cape Spear, NL]

It is. Thank you.

Building on that, with regard to the quality review process, I know that the findings of your own evaluation were different from what the Auditor General found. The Auditor General's numbers on accuracy were lower than the agency's numbers.

What is being put in place to measure more accurately the quality review process to ensure that Canadians are getting the answers they deserve?

[Melanie Serjak]

I can say that the officer of the Auditor General did validate the method that we use to measure accuracy and completeness, and they agreed with the methodology that we use. I'll just remind the table that for the account-specific phone calls, our levels of accuracy are just over 90% at this point in time. We monitor them weekly. That was based on a sample of about 130,000 phone call recordings that we review per year.

With regard to moving forward, we are changing and modifying the training and quality evaluation framework and curriculum. From a training perspective, we are looking at rolling out a more senior and standardized level of trainer who is also coached in adult-style learning to ensure that the training is received in the most optimal way possible. Then, as I mentioned earlier, we are looking at implementing, in the very near future, some automation around our quality review process to make it even more efficient and more effective for our quality evaluators—to assist them in the quality review process as well.

[Tom Osborne, Liberal, Cape Spear, NL]

One of the responses to the Auditor General was, “by September 2026 the Canada Revenue Agency will complete the review of the overall evaluation framework”. Has this process started? Can you give us an update?

[Melanie Serjak]

The process has begun. Some of the examples I just gave in my previous answer are part of that year-long review. We chose September 2026 because we intend to be able to leverage the capabilities of the new telephony platform to assist even more in our quality evaluation process and the training for our agents.

I think I'll leave it there. Does that answer your question?

[Tom Osborne, Liberal, Cape Spear, NL]

I think so.

[Melanie Serjak]

Okay.

[Tom Osborne, Liberal, Cape Spear, NL]

My guess is that the older demographic will rely more on speaking to a live agent. The younger demographics will probably rely more on the chatbot or other forms of communication.

The chatbot has not been very accurate either. We've had some responses about how it is improving, the introduction of AI and so on.

What measures have been put in place for the self-service tools to ensure that they're more user-friendly and more accurate so that people have confidence when they're making contact?

[Melanie Serjak]

All of the self-service options we offer digitally to Canadians are followed with measurable key performance indicators, which we track regularly. That's not just to monitor usage, but also to monitor quality.

With regard to the GenAI chatbot, what was raised in the Office of the Auditor General's report was interesting. The GenAI chatbot was not part of the scope of the audit, although they chose to include it, which is fair. I believe the OAG asked the GenAI chatbot six questions. We have had over a million chats with Canadians since we launched the GenAI chatbot. Denis referenced earlier the testing that went on before the launch. Our target is a 90% accuracy rate. That is what we strive to achieve through internal testing and testing with Canadians. If it doesn't achieve that, changes are made, as it is monitored quite regularly.

With regard to the demographics calling our contact centres versus using our online tools, people aged 65 and over are quite active digitally, but there are some who prefer to call, and those are usually our lengthier phone calls. We're seeing a shift. As people move toward more digital services, the simpler and less complex tax questions get answered through those online tools, which leaves the more complex ones or the ones that take a longer amount of time on the phone.

We're constantly adjusting and calibrating our capacity to meet the different service levels needed.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much. That is the time.

We are going to begin our final round. Again, there will be five individuals asking questions of various lengths.

Ms. Kusie, you'll kick things off for us for five minutes, please.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Thank you.

I'm going to return to the chief audit and evaluation executive role and the Auditor General's findings of the “limited validation of vendor invoices by both Shared Services Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency.”

Mr. Jones, how many millions did your agency and the CRA hand out without verifying work?

[Scott Jones]

Mr. Davis explained the way we go through and verify. They were verified, and we're looking forward to showing that to the Auditor General. That wasn't the focus.

Perhaps we should have been more proactive in providing the Auditor General's team with that information. That is a lesson learned for us, because we certainly have that and we verify it. It was verified as the service was first provided. We verified both their billing and how they were generating this every month. As Mr. Davis explained, there was a verification process that went through.

Also, this contract is substantially different from the new one. There is some fixed infrastructure built in as part of this. There was a verification process, and we look forward to showing it.

Mr. Davis can provide more details on all of the steps, if that would be helpful.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

No, that's fine. Thank you, Mr. Jones.

You're saying that there was a verification completed, and yet this information wasn't provided to the Auditor General. You mentioned in your opening statement that there was some inaccurate interpretation. Why wasn't this documentation provided to the AG, please?