The Canada Revenue Agency is looking to hire or rehire about 1,700 call centre workers over the next few months to manage an influx of calls during the upcoming tax season.
Melanie Serjak, an assistant commissioner at the CRA, told reporters Wednesday the agency is aiming to reach a total of about 4,500 agents to handle a "very high forecast" in demand.
Serjak said it's normal for the CRA to increase its staffing levels during the high peak season, when the agency can receive more than 300,000 phone calls per day.
At the height of last year's tax filing season, she said the agency had about 3,300 call centre staff. She said hiring is underway in hopes of increasing that number by more than 1,000 people this year.
"We always rehire or extend term contracts during our high peak season to give us that flexibility that we need to operate throughout the course of the year," Serjak said, noting there are currently around 2,700 employees working at CRA call centres.
The agency is seeking to grow its staffing levels as several departments and agencies are warning their employees of looming job cuts.
The Public Service Alliance of Canada said last week 219 of its members at Natural Resources Canada received notices this week saying their jobs might be cut.
In addition to those, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada said Friday about 200 of its own members at Natural Resources Canada received notices.
Another 109 people at the Public Service Commission of Canada, 92 people at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada and 74 staffers at the Department of Finance received similar notices, the union said.
Ottawa is looking to cut program spending and administration costs by about $60 billion over the next five years though its Comprehensive Expenditure Review.
The latest federal budget said the exercise will involve "restructuring operations and consolidating internal services." It said it will also involve workforce adjustments and attrition to return the size of the public service to "a more sustainable level."
Asked about potential cuts at the CRA Wednesday, assistant commissioner Maxime Guénette said decisions "are still being made at the agency level."
While the planned hiring at the CRA's call centres will involve temporary workers, Guénette said an analysis is still ongoing when it comes to the agency's permanent workforce.
"What we've been able to tell employees at the agency is that there are no cuts, no workforce adjustment announcements that are planned between now and the end of the calendar year," he said.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne set a 100-day timeline for the CRA to address call centre delays on Sept. 2, putting in place a deadline of Dec. 11.
During that time, the CRA says the number of unique calls answered has more than doubled — from 35 per cent to its target of 70 per cent, with peaks of 92 per cent.
Serjak said the agency is aiming to maintain that 70 per cent target goal, throughout the course of the next few months and into tax filing season.
"We will never be in a position to answer 100 per cent of the phone calls that we receive at the agency," Serjak said. "Even with that number of agents on the phone this filing season, there will be times where we may not meet that 70 per cent service level."
The CRA has worked to reduce the number of calls it receives by expanding digital self-service options, like increasing the types of questions its GenAI chatbot beta can answer.
After placing 167 calls to the CRA's contact centres over four months this year, the office of Auditor General Karen Hogan reported in October that CRA call centre staff answered just 17 per cent of its individual tax questions accurately.
The report found agent responses to business tax or general benefits questions were accurate just over 54 per cent of the time.
However, the CRA says in a news release that it reviewed more than 100,000 call recordings this year and found agents provided accurate information 92 per cent of the time.
Wayne Long, secretary of state for the Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions, told the House of Commons public accounts committee last week that the government is working on a three-to-five-year plan for the agency as its 100-day plan to improve its services reaches its end point.
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
