Taxpayer Complaints Surge Despite CRA 100-Day Improvement Plan
The Office of the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson says it saw an increase of 27 per cent in complaints against the Canada Revenue Agency in the 12-month period to March 31, despite the Finance Minister’s 100-day plan to improve service standards at the agency.
Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s push to fix the CRA has boosted transparency and led to several short-term improvements, but the agency still has a lot of work to do, ombudsperson François Boileau said in a report published on Tuesday.
Mr. Champagne’s campaign “demonstrated the dire need for mid- to long-term solutions to address many concerns about CRA services,” Mr. Boileau wrote in the report.
The reforms, including increases to call centre staffing and new digital tools, along with the fact that Prime Minister Mark Carney hasn’t introduced many income tax changes, likely helped ensure a smoother tax season last spring. The reprieve followed two rocky years in 2024 and 2025 marked by taxpayer confusion over complex or last-minute tax changes under the Trudeau government and technical snafus at CRA.
But Mr. Champagne’s plan appears to have done little to stem an onslaught of taxpayer complaints. Mr. Boileau’s report shows the number of complaints rose to 3,558 between April 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, compared to 2,796 in the 2024-2025 fiscal year.
And the spike in complaints was most acute during the second half of 2025, a period that includes the implementation of the 100-day plan, which ran from early September to early December.
Mr. Boileau said he’s increasingly hearing from Canadians who struggle with issues that often emerge after the end of tax season. One of the main drivers of the jump in complaints last year was due to delays in processing personal income tax return adjustments, which are requests to change returns that have already been filed.
In complex cases, the CRA took up to 50 weeks, or nearly a year, to process the paperwork. That was more than twice as long as the agency’s stated service standard of 20 weeks, according to Mr. Boileau’s report. Complex adjustments include situations in which the CRA needs more information or additional verification, according to its website.
Canadians currently get little information about what they should expect when their files take longer to process than the agency publicly says they should. While other federal departments have the technology to tell users how much longer it will likely take to process their case and approximately how many people are ahead of them, the CRA’s online processing estimates are more rudimentary, the report found.
That lack of guidance about processing delays, in turn, tends to generate a cascade of complaints, Mr. Boileau said. For example, Canadians might call the CRA to try to get more information, only to become frustrated over the quality of the agency’s call centre service, he said.
Even the process of complaining about poor service to the CRA can lead to more complaints to Mr. Boileau’s office, as many Canadians using the agency’s Service Feedback Program said they did not receive a response within the published service standards.
Mr. Boileau has launched a new investigation into the income tax adjustment delays and said the agency should expand automated processing for simple adjustments. He also urged the CRA to modernize online tools to check processing times and the progress of specific tax files, among other recommendations.
Changes introduced as part of the 100-day plan included a reversal of planned cuts to call centre personnel and several improvements to streamline bureaucratic processes and enable Canadians to solve more tax-related issues online, without having to call the agency.
For example, the agency enabled taxpayers to reset their log-in credentials and arrange to repay tax debts online, without having to call an agent.
CRA spokesperson Kim Thiffault said in an e-mailed statement that the agency welcomes the recommendations and continues to work closely with Mr. Boileau’s office.
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
