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“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

While Auditor General Michael Ferguson may not have used the exact words of Network anchorman Howard Beale to describe the Canada Revenue Agency’s appallingly long delays in processing tax appeals, he may as well have.

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“That type of performance just isn’t acceptable and the government departments need to find a way to design their services so that they actually meet the needs of the citizens,” Ferguson said in a news conference after the release of his Fall reports on Tuesday.

The auditor looked at five fiscal years of tax objections and found that the CRA took, on average, 143 days to resolve low-complexity objections from the time they were filed by the taxpayers to the date of their resolution. Medium-complexity objections took 431 days and it took 896 days for high-complexity objections to be resolved.