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Annual report now available
Canada’s Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson, Mr. François Boileau, released his annual report, Fair Access to Service, which was tabled on 8 October 2024 in the House of Commons by Ms. Iqra Khalid, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Revenue. The report provides an overview of the activities of the Office of the Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson (OTO) between April 1, 2023, and March 31, 2024.
The report details how the OTO influenced service improvements at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) by reviewing service issues and complaints. It also includes three recommendations to the Minister of National Revenue and the Chair of the Board of Management to improve the CRA’s service to Canadians.
Through the lens of how the OTO’s work can be a catalyst for change at the CRA, the first section of the report examines complaint trends for the 2023–2024 fiscal year, during which the OTO made a difference by:
- answering over 4500 enquiries
- receiving over 2800 complaints
- referring almost 1400 complaints to CRA Service Feedback
- prioritizing over 500 complaints and requesting that the CRA review the taxpayer’s issue urgently
These were the highest number of complaints and enquiries the OTO has ever received outside of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The report also explains how the OTO influenced change at the CRA through requests for service improvement, and it describes the CRA’s actions resulting from these requests. For example, in March 2024, the Ombudsperson requested that the CRA make changes to prevent an issue blocking callers from reaching its contact centres during regular hours of service. As a result, the CRA changed its telephone system to allow callers to access its Individual Tax, Benefits, and Business Enquiries telephone lines during all hours in which the contact centres were open across Canada, regardless of the area code or time zone of the caller.
Additionally, the report analyzes the CRA’s efforts to make sure vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations get the benefits and credits they are entitled to. It analyzes the CRA’s existing programs, including the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program and SimpleFile by Phone, and discusses how they could be improved to better meet Canadians’ needs.
Kindly click here to read the full article.
The annual report can be accessed here.
