Dealing with CRA more gruelling than necessary

It’s unacceptable.

Earlier this week, federal Auditor General Karen Hogan released startling numbers about the accuracy and availability of information provided by the Canada Revenue Agency to Canadians looking for tax help.

What she found? That during the last fiscal year, only 18 per cent of those who contacted CRA received timely information — and worse, that only 17 per cent of general inquiries made in a series of test calls actually received an accurate answer.

“Canadians are expected to provide their tax returns on time and with accurate information. And I think, in return, they should expect that the Canada Revenue Agency will be available in a timely fashion and provide them with accurate information and I would say this is not the case,” Hogan said.

She’s right.

Everyone, from politicians on down, has to understand that dealing with CRA is different from most other functions of government — including the justice system. In the justice system, you’re innocent until proven guilty. With CRA, you’re guilty until you can — hopefully — prove that you’re innocent.

What we mean is that, once you’ve signed and sent your tax forms, you’re deemed fully responsible for what they contain. If an error is found, that means you’ve paid less than you should have, CRA will correct it, order you to pay what you owe, and add interest. If you’ve made mistakes before, you may face penalties as well. They are not negotiable.

There’s no discussion — you bear absolute liability for what you’ve written on your forms. Not only that, if you’ve made decisions which actually cost you money based on bad advice, they may be deemed to be uncorrectable — especially if it’s unrecorded telephone advice.

This isn’t to say that CRA is patently unreasonable; you are allowed to refile your taxes if an error is made, and if it turns out the CRA needs to return money to you, they can.

CRA says the errors and delays are the result of a rapid reduction in call centre staff, and that it is now working to improve call centre delays and other issues. And this is hardly anything the agency needs.

The CRA’s reputation is already tattered enough. This call centre performance debacle comes after a late-arriving tax regulation change saw thousands of Canadians having to navigate whether doing things like co-signing a child’s mortgage meant they had created a “trust” and would need to immediately file a new-to-them T-3 tax form. Guaranteed, that involved questions that no CRA call centre could answer correctly, because even seasoned tax professionals were flummoxed. Not all of that mess was CRA’s doing — the federal government also contributed to the confusion with a late, badly thought-out tax law change.

But back to the matter at hand, CRA call centres. (And we’ll leave aside for a second that the auditor’s review also found that 8.6 million tax callers got shunted off to automated services before ever even having the chance to talk to a human CRA staffer).

If you’re trying to make your way through your taxes, using CRA representatives who are apparently wrong more often than they are right, the government can hardly call it your fault.

After all, why aren’t you going to trust the advice you get from CRA?

Their representatives deal with tax questions every day. You deal with taxes once or twice a year. You call the CRA advice line at tax time for the same reason you call the seasonal Butterball Turkey Talk-Line at Christmastime — because cooking that annual turkey can be unfamiliar and daunting, and a little calm expertise is always a good thing.

Except when it is nothing of the kind.

Oh, and the Turkey Talk-Line will probably take your call. CRA? Maybe not.

» Winnipeg Free Press