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Revenue agency needs a lesson in customer service

A Burnaby man who’s spent the better part of a year trying to rectify a mistake on his father’s income tax return says Canada Revenue Agency needs to get its act together. Arne Sorbo lives at the Swedish Assisted Living Residence in Burnaby.
Sorbo
Michael Sorbo, right, and his father Arne are unimpressed with the customer service they received from Canada Revenue Agency following a mistake made on Arne's tax return in 2011. Michael says the agency is broken and changes are needed.

A Burnaby man who’s spent the better part of a year trying to rectify a mistake on his father’s income tax return says Canada Revenue Agency needs to get its act together.

Arne Sorbo lives at the Swedish Assisted Living Residence in Burnaby. The 88-year-old has Parkinson’s disease and Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and when it came time to fill out his tax return in 2011, he mistakenly forgot to include a $6,000 pension he receives from Norway. Because of the mistake, which Sorbo’s son Michael also failed to catch before it was submitted, he received a bill from Canada Revenue Agency for $3,400 – nearly three years after the return was sent to the agency.

“That was a mistake and I understand we have to pay taxes on it. I said to them, though, the penalty seems high because it’s almost the same amount as the tax,” Michael said.

But then another bill came in the mail, this time for about $8,000 due to a clerical error by Canada Revenue Agency. Somewhere along the return process, the agency listed Michael’s mother as under 65 years old, when in fact she is in her 80s, which resulted in additional charges.

Money aside, Michael said the real issue in this situation is Canada Revenue Agency’s convoluted and inconsiderate way of doing business.

“When I pointed out they had made an error, it was really annoying because they didn’t fix it right away,” he said.

There is a fairness provision, which allows people to request penalties and interest be waived in light of delay or error on the part of Canada Revenue Agency, financial hardship or inability to pay, civil disturbance, natural or human-made disaster, death, accident, serious illness or mental illness.

“So I sent that in and they said, ‘Well, we’ll look at this in 15 months,’ but now they phoned me and they’re going to look at it right now because of the media attention,” Michael said.

He shared his story on CBC earlier this month, and as he said, he was contacted by Canada RevenueAgency almost right away.

But Michael doesn’t believe it should take speaking out on TV to get the agency’s attention.

“The first thing that’s annoying is they didn’t get back to me,” he said. “When I worked at the securities commission for 17 years and got calls and emails, we had service standards.”

What’s more, Canada Revenue Agency has closed its counter service at the Pender Street and King George Boulevard locations, so when Michael went to the office hoping to clear up the problems, there was no one available.

“It seems to me they don’t really want to speak with you to resolve things. They want you to call the general number, and I did call the general number when I had problems in September and that didn’t work,” he said.

Michael has been in contact with Canadians for Tax Fairness, and he’s also received several emails from the office of Murray Rankin, the MP for Victoria and the NDP critic for national revenue and pensions, that said the minister was keen to raise the issue in the House of Commons.

“(Canada Revenue Agency’s) systems are broken and I think they know about some of these but maybe because they’re such a big organization to change things is so hard,” Michael said. “That’s to me what the frustration is.”

Thanks to the media attention, the Sorbo’s finances are finally being sorted out but Michael hopes the agency will start implementing some changes to improve its customer service.

“This has come to somebody’s attention in Ottawa, and hopefully they can put pressure and just say, ‘Look (Canada Revenue Agency) your service standards need to be improved maybe you guys can start doing that?’” he added.