Mr. Speaker, I am rising today to follow up on a question I asked on November 22 about a very important matter for most of your constituents, and mine, and I am sure the constituents of all members of the House: the Canada Revenue Agency' call centres. This is an important matter for most people because it is tax season, and we are filing our tax returns with the CRA, which expects to receive all of the necessary information on time. In return, we expect to receive prompt answers and sometimes a cheque from the CRA.
The verdict on the CRA call centres is clear: they do not make the grade. Surely, this Auditor General's report cannot be more scathing than last year's. Just to recap briefly, the Auditor General found that when callers phoned a CRA call centre to request information on their own files, more than half of the calls were blocked. Out of 53.5 million calls, 29 million were blocked. Nearly 30 million of the 53 million calls were simply blocked. The callers were not even put on hold to wait for the next available agent. The calls were just blocked. The phone would not even ring.
The Auditor General found that when callers did manage to reach an agent, they were given wrong information 30% of the time. This means people are calling a representative of the Government of Canada for advice on their own files and getting inaccurate information 30% of the time, causing them to be misled on their own files. One would hope that when a person calls the Government of Canada to request information, the agents answering the phone will at least, in most cases, provide accurate information, but that is not the case at the Canada Revenue Agency.
Imagine if these statistics applied to a private company. Imagine a cell phone provider or Internet provider with those sorts of statistics. That company would have gone out of business a long time ago. Customers would have simply given up on a company that provided such poor customer service.
However, when it comes to the Government of Canada, there is the impression that this sort of thing is normal and that it is okay. The government is complicated. It takes far too much money to provide quality service. That is what the government is telling us again today. Four months after this issue was raised, there are still no measures in place to resolve the situation. All we are hearing are things like “we know”, “we are taking the Auditor General's report into consideration”, “we are going to do something; do not worry”, “we have a plan”, “we will find a solution“ and “we will provide better service”. Today, four months after the report was issued, there is no indication that the situation has improved.
I am asking my colleague to tell Canadians, yes or no, whether they have more than a 50% chance of reaching an agent when they call the Canada Revenue Agency and, if they do manage to reach an agent, whether they have more than a 70% chance of getting accurate information.