Nobody likes to call the CRA for any reason, but there are times when a question needs an answer to and of course it would seem reasonable if it’s a tax issue that you would go right to the source. Unfortunately it is beginning to look like that you may not be able to rely on the CRA has a reliable call center.
For those who have no issues with calling the CRA with a tax question often do so frequently. There have been lots of people in the past who have generally complained that they just couldn’t seem to get a straight answer. Often they came away with even more questions, or more confused than they were before the contact.
Worse still some have acted on the advice they received and then discovered later on the advice was not accurately. However, the bottom line is you are the responsible tax payer and it is up to you to know the law. This is frustrating when it may appear as though who are implementing these laws don’t always understand them themselves.
Back in 2010 the Canadian Federation of Independent Business was airing this complaint. They actually conducted their own survey and discovered that there were plenty of mistakes being made just by using four standard questions to test the CRA response with. The outcome was that the call center was providing incomplete or inaccurate answers 19% of the time.
Now recent information is showing that for every four businesses that seek out tax help from the call center, one of them is getting bad information. The CRA actually ran their own study and came up with this result. So it isn’t like they are not aware of the issues. It isn’t also something that is new.
Often accountants who require a question to be answered will call several times and use the most common answer given.
One may think that the CRA doesn’t receive all that many calls, so how big of a deal is this really? Well it is said that they receive about 3.3 million calls each year, so one could say it’s a very big deal based on these figures.
Of course they are going to address the problem. The solution to them is to better educate their call center employees. Plus now the individual you are dealing with now at the CRA has to provide you with their unique agent identification number, although how valuable this will be to you in regards to acting upon their advice that could lead you astray is yet to be seen.
The best advice you can rely on is your own tax accountant. This is the individual who has enough experience to know whether the answers he is looking for in regards to your tax matter are believable and if not he has the resources to check it out further.
