Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) AI Chatbot 'Charlie' Reportedly Gave Incorrect Tax Filing Guidance at Scale

December 12, 2025

The AI-powered system, Charlie the Chatbot, deployed by the CRA, has reportedly been offering incorrect or incomplete tax guidance on a large scale. An audit by the Auditor General of Canada found that the chatbot's responses were accurate in fewer than half of tested cases.

First released across multiple CRA webpages in March 2020, Charlie is said to have been used by millions of users.

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Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.620, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.5 — similarity 0.616, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 1.2 — similarity 0.616, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: canada-revenue-agency-(cra), government-of-canada
Alleged developer: unknown-generative-ai-developers, canada-revenue-agency-(cra), government-of-canada
Alleged harmed parties: general-public, general-public-of-canada, epistemic-integrity, canadian-taxpayers

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1310

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.