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OTTAWA – The Canada Revenue Agency is still giving wrong information to people inquiring about tax issues.

The Auditor General looked at the CRA’s call centres in 2017 and found agents were giving the wrong information as much as 30 per cent of the time. It also found almost half of phone calls didn’t get through, with callers getting busy signals and having to call back multiple times.

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Manitoba Conservative MP Marty Morantz raised the problem with an order paper question in the House of Commons, wanting to know if the government had turned the numbers around.

In the current fiscal year, the government found call centre agents were giving the wrong information 13 per cent of the time to personal tax filers, 17 per cent of the time for benefit inquires and six per cent of the time for business inquiries.

This could lead to callers paying too much or too little tax and later being subject to reassessments

In 2018, the agency overhauled training requirements for new call centre agents having them do eight weeks of additional training on top of the six that was required previously, all before they start taking live calls. They’re also more frequently updating manuals and guides the operators refer to when taking calls.