CRA billed taxpayers over $18 million for AI chatbot that spouted inaccurate info

The Canada Revenue Agency blew nearly $20 million of taxpayer money on an “AI” chatbot that repeatedly gave out the wrong information to Canadians trying to file their taxes.

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The Canada Revenue Agency blew nearly $20 million of taxpayer money on an “AI” chatbot that repeatedly gave out the wrong information to Canadians trying to file their taxes.

The CRA’s AI tool, named Charlie the Chatbot, was accurate about 44 per cent of the time when tested by Auditor General Karen Hogan’s team.

The software feature was announced in 2020 by then-National Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier and was slated to cost taxpayers more than $18 million.

According to documents tabled in Parliament on Monday, $13.67 million went to pay the salaries of those who worked on it, in addition to costs related to employee benefits and travel. Another $3.21 million was spent on the project’s IT consultants.

At the time of its release, the CRA warned the chatbot was still “learning” about the agency, saying “the questions you ask will help it become more knowledgeable and interactive.”

“Charlie will make it easier to get the information you need to help you file your income tax and benefit return\!” wrote the agency in 2020.

However, Hogan’s report said the software, which is currently still available on 13 different CRA webpages, remains far from accurate.

“Charlie’s responses tended to be brief, offering limited context and minimal additional information,” reads the AG report published in October. “We found that Charlie provided accurate answers in only 2 out of the 6 questions we asked it, while the other public web-based conversational artificial intelligence tools answered 5 out of 6 questions accurately.”

According to the CRA, people have engaged in over seven million “conversations” with Charlie and asked over 18 million questions since its inception.

Still, the chatbot was recently recorded as having a 70 per cent “accuracy threshold,” with a new unreleased version reaching “approximately 90 per cent” last month.

However, the agency noted that “the exact number of questions the Generative Artificial Intelligence chatbot has answered correctly cannot be precisely determined without conducting a comprehensive review of all interaction transcripts.”

The CRA released the results of its “100-day service improvement plan” on Thursday, which reported that 70 per cent of Charlie the Chatbot users had reached their “goal” in November.

The report also noted that the agency’s overall responsiveness to people had nearly doubled during the fall. This was partly due to rehiring or extending the contracts of over 1,200 call centre employees.