Joseph Devaney finds one wrong deadline in Cra Canada chatbot test

cra canada’s AI-powered chatbot answered tax questions quickly in nine test conversations, but Joseph Devaney found one plainly wrong deadline and several incomplete replies. The chatbot is meant to help Canadians get tax answers without calling CRA call centres, and the agency warns that users rely on its responses at their own risk.

Joseph Devaney’s nine tests

Devaney, a chartered professional accountant and director of financial education platform Video Tax News, tested the chatbot on a variety of individual and business tax questions. He said the bot gave helpful answers to a number of questions and was a much faster alternative than calling the CRA.

One test stood out. Devaney asked about a corporation with a tax year ending on March 31 of this year and asked when the filing and payment deadlines were. The chatbot got the filing date right but gave the wrong payment deadline.

The same prompt produced a different result a few minutes later. When the question was put to the chatbot again, it gave the correct answer for both the filing and payment deadlines.

CRA chatbot and tax topics

The CRA first launched the chatbot during the 2025 tax season, and it now appears as a round robot face in the bottom right corner of some CRA webpages. The agency says it can handle questions about individual taxes and benefits, as well as businesses, trusts and charities.

The chatbot relies only on government-provided information, but the CRA’s own warning says its answers may not be “fully accurate.” The warning also states: “Taxpayers use information generated by the chat at their own risk.”

Nina Ioussoupova on different answers

Nina Ioussoupova, a CRA spokesperson, said the chatbot may generate different responses to the same prompt because it conducts a different real-time search for answers each time a question is asked. After The Globe’s inquiry, she said the CRA was unable to independently reproduce the error, and its own testing produced accurate responses.

Devaney also found the bot could miss some tax filing triggers. On a question about whether a newcomer to Canada has to file a tax return, it listed main reasons such as having to pay taxes and wanting to claim benefits, but it did not include other circumstances, including having sold property or investments.

For taxpayers, the practical lesson is simple: the chatbot can save time and cover a wide range of topics, but a single answer should not be treated as the last word when a filing date or payment deadline is at stake.