CRA Call Center employee who are susceptible to job cuts as part of Carney's cost savings plan, says Union, says Union

The union, which CANADA Revenue Agency represents, warns that Ottawa's effort on cost savings will affect the employment of call center workers disproportionately, which leads to a poorer service for Canadian taxpayers.

Since May 2024, the CRA has reduced its workforce by more than 10 percent and replaced more than 8,000 jobs, many contract workers in Call Centers were across the country.

At the same time, the federal data show that the CRA service standards are worse -an indication that the agency has difficulty reacting to inquiries related to annual tax ratings.

“Cra Call Center was under pressure for a long time, but we found that the service standards have deteriorated even more in the past one year,” said Marc Brière, National President of the Tax Disorder union. “Additional cuts that the Carney government wants will absolutely decimate our call centers.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney asked the federal ministries to find “ambitious” internal savings by August of this year before the household presented in autumn was presented in 2025. The departments must find paths to reduce the program expenditure in the financial year by April 1, 2026 by 7.5 percent, followed by 10 percent of the savings in 2027 and 15 percent in the 2028-29 financial year.

In an email to the globe and the post office, the CRA confirmed that it was in the early phases, how to lower the expenses within the department. Spokesman Etienne Biram said that “no final decisions” were made about cuts and that the agency will concentrate on “minimizing the effects on Canadians and employees”.

The new Live Chat service from CRA, which is supported by less than 100 agents

The agency also admitted that the demand for telephone support can exceed its capacity. As a result, some callers are “redirected to automated self-service options”.

Mr. Brière is concerned that the CRA Call Center employees aim for the workforce in other work plans, since many of them are contract workers and have no full -time employees with the government.

“It's the easiest place to cut,” he said. “And for the average Canadian taxpayer it is the worst place for cuts because it is becoming increasingly difficult for CRA to be able to make calls quickly to your inquiries.”

Last week, the union wrote to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne and asked to visit a Cra Call Center to observe the working conditions of the employees. The union described these conditions as “tense”, whereby the employees felt overwhelmed and exhausted when they are overwhelmed every day.

Cra Call Centers, who are known as “contact centers” in the agency, have been plagued by personnel problems and inefficiencies for years. In 2017, the office of the Canada of the Auditor of Canada published a devastating report by the agency, in which it was found that Cra Call Center agents could not cope with the volume of the incoming calls. The report states that Call Centers blocked more than half of the calls to keep a waiting time of 30 minutes or less.

According to the Auditor General report, the service levels improved dramatically and fell together with the agency to get a hiring stroll through to increase the line-up in their nine call centers across the country. When pandemic met in spring 2020, the CRA continued to increase the HR department.

A measure of the Cra-efficiency levels is the topicality with which the agency reacts to the objections of public objections with low complexity tax.

The CRA mandate is to react to these questions within 180 days. In the 2018-19 financial year, 94 percent of the cases met this service standard. The following year it was 97 percent. During the pandemic year Relief programs that have complicated tax submissions.

From 2023, however, the overall efficiency of the CRA decreased dramatically. In 2023-24, the agency only fulfilled its service standard for objections to low complexity tax in 61 percent of cases.

The union leads to poorer service in the contact centers to a lower the staff. “If agents have too many calls to cope with them, the quality of the answers is bad. The number of false answers is increasing,” said Brière.

Opinion: Can someone please help for the love of God Cra to repair their website?

Contracting employees play a major role in the approximately 8,000 CRA positions that were lost last year. The figures for the agency show that in March 2024 there were 15,323 contract workers who fell to 11,014 a year later.

The latest data received from The Globe from CRA show that the number of employees in call centers between 2021-22 have been significantly fallen. At the peak of the pandemic, 6,704 employees nationwide in Call Centers. This is at 4:133 p.m. until the last month.

CRA has reduced the employees in Call Centers for over three years and decided not to extend thousands of contracts.

In an explanation to the globe, CRA spokesman Nina Ioussoupova said that due to the annual seasonal attitude for the tax season, it had a fluctuating worker. Call Center roles will be temporarily temporary, according to the agency and if the demand for the CRA telephone services increases, it is “all efforts to rehire previously trained contacts agents”.

Mr. Briére is particularly critical of this approach.

Two employees in one of the CRA contact centers in Calgary said they do not react to “many” incoming calls because they do not have the time in an eight -hour layer to treat them. The globe does not identify the individuals because they are not entitled to speak publicly about their employer.

Every day, the agents deal between 20 and 30, they said. When more employees were in the center, further calls were answered.

The employees said that in the past two years the staff level in the Calgary Call Center decreased by about 40 percent. One of the employees said that the CRA guideline for agents should minimize the time for calls to master more volume. But because many calls in nature are complex and the public has often spent more than an hour to speak to an agent, it is difficult to quickly solve calls.

The CRA has tried to innovate the way in which the public reacts to the public to innovate artificial intelligence by introducing an online chat service to answer questions from taxpayers. In a recent examination of Globe and Mail, however, it was found that the CRA had so far trained fewer than 100 employees to support the pilot service and to convert them into a source of symptoms for Canadians who have difficulty answering their tax questions.

With a report by Erica Alini