Ottawa, Ontario, Feb 13, 2026, 07:21 (EST)
- CRA targets answering 70% of unique callers and adds Saturday service during peak filing weeks
- Agency is steering taxpayers to online self-serve tools, including a GenAI chatbot beta and live chat
- CRA also streamlined how tax preparers get authorized access and is pushing backup MFA to cut lockouts
Canada’s revenue agency said it is hiring or rehiring about 1,700 contact-centre employees and adding Saturday phone service as it targets answering an average 70% of unique callers during the 2026 tax-filing season. The Canada Revenue Agency said the temporary staffing boost would bring its contact-centre workforce to about 4,500, with Saturday service running March 21 to May 2 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern time. (Canada)
The push lands just ahead of the opening of the filing season on Feb. 23, when call volumes typically surge. On its service-improvement webpage, the CRA noted its contact centres received more than 12 million calls during last year’s tax season, about 200,000 each weekday. (Canada)
The agency is trying to pull some of that demand online, pointing taxpayers to self-serve tools and a “GenAI” chatbot beta — shorthand for generative artificial intelligence — alongside live chat inside My Account for questions tied to an individual file. The CRA said it aims to issue a notice of assessment, the agency’s statement of your return result, within two weeks for online filings and within 12 weeks for paper returns; it also flagged April 30 as the filing deadline for most Canadians. (Newswire)
In a separate advisory on Wednesday, the CRA said it removed a five-day wait in an alternative authorization process that lets tax preparers gain access to a client’s tax information through the “Represent a Client” portal, used by authorized representatives. It said taxpayers can grant access through their CRA account or by providing details from a notice of assessment that is at least six months old, and noted that tax preparers can no longer request authorization for individual clients through EFILE. (Canada)
The agency is also leaning on tighter login security to keep phones from being swamped by locked-out users. CRA account users who do not already have a backup multi-factor authentication method — the extra step after a password — will be prompted to add one such as a passcode grid or a third-party authenticator app, though users can skip the prompt during tax season, the CRA said. (Canada)
Behind the scenes, the CRA says it is still rebuilding call-centre capacity and tools after years of complaints. In a backgrounder, it put annual call volume at 25 million to 32 million and said repeated calls have strained capacity; it also said the agency boosted capacity in fall 2025 by adding about 1,250 service representatives and is fast-tracking a move to a cloud-based phone platform under a contract awarded to Bell Canada in July 2025 through a procurement led by Shared Services Canada. (Canada)
But the agency’s targets come with baggage, and the next spike in call volume will test whether the fixes stick. In an October 2025 report, Auditor General Karen Hogan said CRA contact centres answered individual tax questions accurately only 17% of the time between February and May 2025 and warned that “Canadians are still waiting too long to get answers to their tax questions.” The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, citing that report, argued that “Hiring more bureaucrats to give even more wrong answers won’t actually fix the problem” without simpler rules. (Global News)
The CRA is betting that more agents, longer hours and a harder nudge toward online tools will keep the system moving once filings open later this month, when people start chasing refunds, benefit questions and missing slips.
