Have you tried calling the Canada Revenue Agency lately, or attempted to get information about your account on their website? If you have, you no doubt found it impossible to get a live human being on the phone, or even a modicum of helpful information online. And, this is the off-season when CRA staff should all be available and sitting by their phones waiting for anxious calls from confused senior boomers like me. Is it because they’re all working from home and had to pick the kids up from swimming lessons?

For a good laugh, read a recent article in The Globe and Mail by Erica Alini, CRA’s persistent call centre delays raise staffing concerns. I gave up trying to get through when some of my recent calls to CRA resulted in a recorded message that the wait time for an agent could be up to three hours. That message has since been deleted, but it’s still impossible to reach a live human being who might be of assistance—but more likely, not.

I’ve been trying for months to access my husband’s CRA account to find out how much contribution room we have left in his Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA). Because my husband has dementia and I take care of his affairs, I tried submitting the number from Line 15000 of his most recent return as requested, and everything but a slice of our DNA to access his file—even that was not enough to allow me into his secret vault. Unable to reach a live human being to confirm my authenticity by answering secret validation questions, I gave up. Miraculously, our accountant managed to get past the CRA gatekeepers and provided the information I needed.

I realize the security safeguards are for our own protection, just like the multiple verification steps I have to endure to access my personal online banking information. But, lordy, lordy, it’s a lot of stress for old ladies like me. I also want to know whether the sixteen-page doctor’s report I had to fill out and get signed by my husband’s doctor about his disability has been received and approved. According to CRA’s online AI chat information, there is a minimum fifteen-week wait for this information, if you are miraculously successful in accessing your account. The generic message was as far as I got. But, you can be sure they have no trouble reaching us if they think we owe them $83.46.

Which brings me to another beef! Why does tax filing have to be so complicated that we all need to hire an accountant to sort out the annual mess? It’s extremely stressful, and with all the demands and regulations, old boomers like me struggle to interpret and complete the documents correctly. Heaven forbid we make a mistake and get slammed with an assessment—which happens to me every damn year! Forget trying to find out what I did wrong, as I can never connect with a live CRA human being who can provide understandable answers or help me. How do other people cope? CRA is omnipotent!

CRA’s response to the problems we civilians/taxpayers encounter reminds me of the famous British Postal Scandal, which lasted from 1999 to 2015, when 900 local community subpostmasters in the U.K. were accused of pilfering funds from the postal service. The problem, in fact, stemmed from a programming error in the Horizon software they were using. For years, the British Postal Service insisted its system was above reproach, that the post office software was not faulty, and that local subpostmasters were responsible for the missing funds. After years of intense lobbying on behalf of the local postmasters, the plaintiffs were exonerated in court when Fujitsu’s Horizon software, which the postal bigwigs had insisted was not faulty, was officially deemed to be the cause of the mistakes. In the meantime, hundreds of innocent people unjustly lost their jobs, pensions, homes, and respect in their communities. Some committed suicide; others had to move away; lives were irreparably damaged, all because the government agency did not listen to and acknowledge that its citizens might be right and the government might be wrong.

According to The Globe and Mail’s article, CRA spokesperson Nina Ioussoupova responded to criticism of staff cutbacks and poor service at CRA by saying, “Understanding when to call and when to use self-serve tools is key to improving everyone’s experience”. Well, if that isn’t a laughable oxymoron! When did it become unacceptable or inconvenient for seniors—or anyone for that matter—to call our taxpayer-funded tax service during regular business hours and expect service when we have a question about the money they’re greedily extracting from us? Or, what about those of us who find it impossible to navigate CRA’s useless and complicated “self-serve tools” that lead you through dead-end loops on their falsely-named Live Chat software?

On September 2, 2025, Erica Alini again posted in The Globe and Mail, Finance Minister announces 100-day plan to fix CRA service delays. Ha! They’ve heard our cry, and I can only hope that doesn’t mean adding an ineffective offshore call centre response team that is so uninformed and incomprehensible we end up hanging up on them. We’ve waited this long; I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer.

According to the Auditor General, eight years after informing CRA of their problems, a new report is expected later this year. A Report? Eight years later? Just call me—I’ll give you a report in four seconds. Better still. Here it is. CRA service sucks! My husband and I will both be dead before their customer service problems get resolved, and we may never know whether our disability claim was received and accepted, or how much room we have left in our TFSAs. By then, it won’t matter. Maybe that’s been their strategy all along.

Followup: September 18, 2025

CRA must have read my blog posting above (!!) because now they’re coming after me. Last week I received a further assessment for $953.00 for tax year 2023! Meanwhile, I tried several times without success to reach them on the phone. Twice, I managed to get a callback a couple of hours later, only to be disconnected a few minutes into our conversation and, no, they did not call me back. Lord, thunderin’ jesus! What the hell is going on there?

Then, The Globe and Mail posted another piece today, The CRA is coming after your knitting club by Allan Lanthier which makes for very interesting reading. It’s beyond belief!