Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise this evening to continue where I left off in November 2017, on my question about the call centre. I asked the minister about the CRA and its notoriously difficult call centre.
A scathing report by the Auditor General pointed out that 64% of all calls into the call centre ended with the agency merely hanging up on the taxpayer. Of the over one-third of the people who were able to get through to a person, 30% of them were then in turn given the wrong information. This was pointed out by the Auditor General, so it is well known. The minister did not dispute the findings of the Auditor General, although the agency was much less candid about the problems that were known to exist then.
The minister's answer to my question that afternoon was wholly unsatisfactory. It was just routine, blame the previous government for everything kind of stuff. Canadians are getting tired of that. The Liberals are in the third year of their mandate so they need to start taking ownership of their track record rather than simply blaming things on the previous government.
The government did make a promise. It promised to make the CRA more client-friendly. A system where people are unable to get through to somebody is not client-friendly. It is a serious problem. Part of the reason it is serious is that when a person calls into the agency, he or she is looking for help. The individual is looking for assistance with compliance.
A problem that may exist, or a question that is unanswered, has a snowball effect. If a taxpayer is given wrong information and then prepares a return or a response to communication with the agency with information that is not correct, then that taxpayer has a problem. That may lead to an appeal or a notice of objection and that bogs the system down even further.
What we are hearing from professional tax preparers across Canada is that the objection process is increasingly bogged down through sloppy audits, through assessments and reassessments that are not done correctly, so the problems continue.
If a person at the front end answering the telephone at a call centre can give a taxpayer accurate information on a timely basis that can lead to the taxpayer complying with the law in the first place, then there would be fewer files in the objection system. Therefore, folks who have to address objections can focus on a smaller number of files. There is a cumulative effect to these problems.
I have spoken to professionals who prepare returns, tax filers, and some people who work in the call centre and in other parts of the CRA. My concern is that things are not getting better. The pressure on call centre employees appears to be merely around reducing time on the phone in order to get the queue down to a shorter number so they do not have to hang up on as many people. That is great. We do not want them hanging up on taxpayers. Answering the phone and giving quick, sloppy, incorrect or wrong information to end a call as quickly as possible is one way to reduce the queue, but it is not the way to help Canadians. That is not being client friendly.
This is an ongoing concern and I found the minister's response on November 22, 2017, to be wholly unsatisfactory.