They Can’t Fix a Checkbox. Now Ottawa Wants Them Filing Your Taxes.

A Quebec woman got hit with a $60,024.66 tax bill because a CRA employee marked her as an immigrant. She was born here. The agency couldn’t fix the mistake. Meanwhile, Parliament is looking at a law that would let that same agency file your tax return without asking you.

By Main AdminOct 25, 20267 min read

They Can’t Fix a Checkbox. Now Ottawa Wants Them Filing Your Taxes.

What happened

On October 28, about 735 CRA employees were told their jobs may be at risk. Roughly 260 are expected to actually leave (Yahoo News Canada). The notices hit the Appeals Branch, the Assessment, Benefit and Service Branch, Compliance Programs, Human Resources and the Commissioner's Office (BNN Bloomberg).

The union called the CRA's explanation "kafka-esque" and promised service would suffer (Yahoo News Canada).

Let's put the number in context. As of March 31, 2026, the CRA had 48,774 employees (BNN Bloomberg). About 260 actual departures is roughly half of one percent. The CRA's 2026–27 plan calls for $1.2 billion in spending reductions over three years (BNN Bloomberg). The agency was planning $5.4 billion in personnel spending in 2025–26 alone (CRA Quarterly Financial Report). That works out to about $110,000 per employee, by our math.

This isn't austerity. It's a rounding error.

The numbers they don't want compared

We compared the CRA to other national tax agencies, using each agency's own published staff numbers and each country's official population:

Canada – CRA — Staff: 48,774 (BNN Bloomberg), Population: 41.8M (Statistics Canada), Staff per 1,000 people: 1.17
U.K. – HMRC (includes customs) — Staff: 70,061 (HMRC workforce data), Population: 69.5M (ONS), Staff per 1,000 people: 1.01
Australia – ATO — Staff: 21,493 (ATO Annual Report), Population: 27.9M (ABS), Staff per 1,000 people: 0.77
U.S. – IRS — Staff: ~74,000 (Fortune), Population: 341.8M (U.S. Census Bureau), Staff per 1,000 people: 0.22

Here's what that means:

The CRA has about 50% more staff per person than Australia's tax office.
It has more than five times the IRS's staffing per person.
It has more staff per person than the U.K.'s HMRC, even though HMRC also runs Britain's customs. In Canada, customs is a separate agency entirely.

And if you live in Quebec, you're paying for two tax bureaucracies. Revenu Québec has another 12,664 employees (Gouvernement du Québec). Count both, and Canada has about 1.47 tax-agency employees for every 1,000 people, nearly double Australia's rate.

Yes, the CRA also delivers benefits and collects provincial income tax outside Quebec. And American states run their own revenue departments, so the IRS comparison isn't perfect. But no footnote explains away a gap this size.

It grew, and it didn't get better

The CRA went from about 40,000 employees in 2015 to 59,155 in 2024, a 48% increase (Fraser Institute). That's almost three times the rate of population growth over the same period (Build Canada).

So what did all those extra people deliver? In October 2025, the Auditor General answered that question:

Only 18% of callers reached an agent within the CRA's own 15-minute standard. In June 2025, it was 5% (Auditor General of Canada).
Callers who wanted an agent waited an average of 31 minutes (Auditor General of Canada).
When auditors asked general individual tax questions, the answers were accurate 17% of the time. Benefits and business tax answers were accurate just over half the time (Auditor General of Canada). Meanwhile, the CRA had been reporting accuracy rates above 87% since 2019 (Auditor General of Canada).

Asked how she'd describe the CRA's accuracy, Auditor General Karen Hogan answered in two words: "As inaccurate" (CBC News).

The real problem: process, not headcount

Here's the finding that should end the "they need more staff" argument. The Auditor General found the CRA graded its agents more on how closely they stuck to their shift and break schedules than on whether their answers were accurate (Auditor General of Canada). Agents got about 2,200 hours of coaching in a year, under 30 minutes per agent (CBC News).

It gets worse:

The chatbot: the CRA's chatbot, "Charlie," got 2 of 6 test questions right. Free public AI tools got 5 of 6 (Auditor General of Canada).
The vendor: on the call-centre platform contract, performance penalties weren't applied. Neither the CRA nor Shared Services Canada could confirm the vendor's invoices were accurate (Shared Services Canada).
The paperwork: the scheduling module needed so much manual input that it generated 180,000 emails just to manage hours of work (Shared Services Canada).

That's an organization measuring the wrong things, training nobody, not holding vendors to account and drowning in its own admin. More bodies won't fix that. More bodies just give the dysfunction more people to work with.

Meanwhile the IRS shed about a quarter of its workforce. Its CEO now says "75,000 people is a lot of people to run an org[anization]" (Government Executive). The IRS's own inspector general has flagged real gaps, including fewer audits (FEDweek). But the IRS is betting on technology, not headcount. Canada keeps betting on headcount.

The pattern

Every time the CRA fails, the answer from Ottawa is the same: hire. When call centres collapsed in 2025, the fix was rehiring about 1,250 agents in an emergency plan (CRA briefing to Parliament). Nobody asked why a 50,000-person agency needs a phone queue at all for questions a decent website should answer.

Complaints to the Taxpayers' Ombudsperson hit 3,558 in 2025–26 (Office of the Taxpayers' Ombudsperson). Some adjustments take up to 50 weeks against a 20-week standard (The Hub). That's a productivity problem.

The private sector doesn't get to fix bad processes by adding staff forever. Neither should the CRA.

What you can do

Know your rights. The Taxpayer Bill of Rights includes the right to accurate information and to complete and timely service. If you got wrong information from an agent, write down the date, time and agent ID. Wrong CRA information can support a taxpayer relief request (Form RC4288) to cancel penalties and interest.
Never rely on a phone answer alone. Given a 17% accuracy rate on general questions, get it in writing through My Account or a written enquiry, or talk to a professional.
Object on time. Don't let CRA delays blow your objection deadline. For most individuals, it's the later of 90 days after the notice date or one year after the filing due date.
Escalate. File a service complaint (Form RC193). If it isn't resolved, go to the Taxpayers' Ombudsperson.
Tell your MP what you want from the November 5 budget. Ask for measurable productivity targets, public processing-time reporting and serious investment in digital self-service, not another hiring wave.

The bottom line

In our view, the CRA's problem was never too few people. It's an agency that grew by almost half in a decade, grades its staff on break schedules instead of right answers, and still gets beaten by a free chatbot. Cut smarter, cut deeper where the work isn't getting done, and make productivity the only metric that matters.

Work in tax, or just dealt with the CRA? Tell us where you see the waste at crauncovered.com. Anonymous submissions are welcome.

Sources

Method note: staff per 1,000 people is calculated by CRA Uncovered from each agency's most recent published headcount and each country's official population estimate. The dates differ slightly: CRA March 2026; HMRC December 2025 payroll headcount, excluding the Valuation Office Agency; ATO June 2025; IRS approximate 2026 headcount.

CRA Uncovered is an independent informational platform and is not affiliated with the Canada Revenue Agency. This article is for general information only and is not professional tax or legal advice. Opinions expressed are those of CRA Uncovered.