Did The CRA’s 100 Day Service Improvement Plan Work?

Geoff Currier

After a scathing review by the Auditor General last September, on services provided by CRA last tax season, the tax department was mandated by the Finance Minister to implement a  “100-Day Plan” which ran from September 2 to December 11,2025.  It has already delivered meaningful progress as tax season 2026 comes to a close. We commend CRA employees for meeting the challenge, as it’s no small feat to communicate with millions of taxpayers and their advisors in such a short period of time.  Have you noticed a change?  Here’s the CRA’s take.

The Backdrop.  It is no surprise to say the Agency receives an exceptionally high volume of calls. Between April 2024 and March 2025, it received over 32 million calls, averaging 107,000 per day, with peaks exceeding 300,000 during tax season.

Getting a prompt response from CRA has been one of the challenges for tax specialists and their clients and perhaps more important, getting accurate information has been problematic.  There have been countless reports of Canadians receiving conflicting and often incorrect information from different CRA agents. 

The Action Plan: The plan was designed in part to reduce wait times for Disability Tax Credit (DTC) applications and Canada Child Benefit Claims. CRA re-allocated some resources and says it processed an additional 23,000 DTC cases and maintained its 70% call-answer target. 

In October of 2025 a system enhancement for T1 adjustments was made to automatically process an additional 115,000 requests annually. A plan was also put in place to address the backlog of tax adjustments.

CRA says it handles some thirty million calls on an annual basis. Its Contact Centre Quality Monitoring Program reviews more than a hundred thousand of those calls and found that over 90% were approved for professional and efficient service as well as accuracy of information.

About 20% of the calls which come in are for general enquiries and CRA says it is working to improve the accuracy of the information provided for those enquiries.

Call-back and Online Services: From mid September to mid December of 2025 a web-based priority call back service was used to respond to more than 5,000 calls per week. These calls were related to both personal CRA accounts and Business Registration Online.

Paying Online:  For your clients with tax debts of $1,000 or more, they can go online to set up their own payment plan without contacting CRA by phone. This could impact up to 600,000 users.

Required Digitization.  While the self-serve options may appear to offload the CRA’s work onto you or your clients, some 3.2 million users accessed the CRA’s portals to self-serve so the option is becoming increasingly popular.   However, much of this is being forced.  For example, as of November 2025, anyone wishing to register for a new business number or CRA program accounts must do so online.

Clients holding a Tax Free Savings Account can now self-serve. The same is true for those submitting adjustments for the Disability Tax Credit. 

The Chatbot: The CRA Online chat service proved popular with 7,800 people using this tool in a five day span in December in My Account. Other online services include the ability to register for new credentials for those who have been locked out of their My Account or who have forgotten their registration information. Registering a business with CRA can now also be done online.

It’s not clear how successful the chatbot feature has been in terms of customer satisfaction. We’ll be looking forward to feedback from both you and your clients on the online and self-serve features introduced or upgraded by CRA.

The Metrics: When it comes to taking calls, CRA’s response target was 70%. This is a major increase from the approximately 35% call responses for a two week period in the summer of 2025. For the period from the 8th to the 12th of December,2025, it says 81% of calls were answered. It needs to be stressed, though, that we’re only being told about a narrow five day window, not what the actual figures were following the 100-day period. 

As for post 100 day months and years, CRA has committed to improved phone services so that calls are directed to specialists. Work is being done on a new contact platform which is slated to be in place by the summer of 2026

The Bottom Line: As mentioned, the figures presented here come from CRA’s own website.

The true test of improvement will be your experience as tax professionals. Let us know what working with CRA is like for you and your clients in these days following the 100 day Service Improvement Plan.  At the Knowledge Bureau we look forward to your feedback.