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editorial

By now, everybody understands that the phrase "your call is important to us" is sometimes a fiction. But no one is thanking the Canada Revenue Agency for its brutal corporate honesty in telling its callers that, actually, your call is not important to us. No, in fact, we're finding it to be quite inconvenient.

There is much to be angry about in Auditor-General Michael Ferguson's critique of customer-service practices at the CRA. But the most frustrating of his findings concerns something that many Canadians have experienced: Those who called the tax agency were often met with a busy signal, or a message telling them to call back later. And many Canadians got that don't-call-us, we'll-tax-you message repeatedly.

The agency decided to hit its wait-time benchmark by simply blocking 29-million phone calls between March 2016 and March 2017. How did we get rid of long waiting lines? By making it impossible for anyone to form a line!

"The agency told us that callers would prefer a busy signal or an automated message to waiting a long time to speak with an agent," the report reads, before noting dryly that "the agency had not surveyed callers to verify this assumption."

It's hard to imagine this happening in other areas of our on-demand world. Picture a grocery store that said, Sorry folks, our cashiers are all busy – and because we know how much you hate the hassle of queuing up, we're locking the doors. You're welcome. Do come back and finish your shopping another time. We might be open. Or not.

The CRA correctly points out that call volumes have increased substantially in recent years; the agency has already identified a fix that will inform callers of expected wait times. This is not a new issue, and the solution won't be implemented in full for at least a year.

In that time, maybe they'll address the finding that fully 30 per cent of the information taxpayers received from customer-service staff was flat-out wrong, a figure far above the CRA's internal error statistics.

These shortcomings may be temporary, but they are not picayune. Individuals and companies require correct, up-to-date information and easy access to those who can provide it. In any given year, personal-income and business taxes represent about 55 per cent of government revenues.

It would inspire more confidence if the agency charged with the important and sometimes complicated work of collecting them didn't have trouble with something as simple as answering the phone.

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