TORONTO: One of every four business callers who ask for tax help from the Canada Revenue Agency’s call centers gets bad information, an internal survey suggests.
The dismal finding is worse than previous estimates by the agency, and confirms repeated complaints by a small-business group that the call centers are routinely dispensing misleading and perhaps legally dubious answers.
The latest survey, specially ordered by the head of the tax organization, tested call-centre workers by asking seven routine questions, phoned in anonymously and randomly by 11 agency employees.
The overall accuracy rate was 75 per cent, though the agency later decided to exclude the answers to one of the questions because so few call-centre workers got it right.
By removing that so-called “outlier,” the agency managed to boost its accuracy rate to 83 per cent. Even that number was far below a previous agency claim that the call centres gave “fully correct” answers 92.5 per cent of the time, based on a large sample from 2013-14.
