I get the same error message for personal tax clients as well. It’s been happening all week. Does anyone know of a resolution or if we must wait for CRA to fix this?
the CRA does not even acknowledge the issue, how will they fix it?
An hour ago CRA finally acknowledged in my thread that there’s an issue and they are working on it.
They refuse to reply to me but did to someone in the thread LOL.
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The first one I accessed this morning I was actually able to see mail, but then my second client and from there on in no such luck…
What a tease!
Also, you can no longer pull up assessment notices - you get a blank page…
That’s been happening to me since the mail went down too. Very frustrating.
If you want to complain publicly, the person to tweet to is @BobWKHamilton who is the Commissioner of the CRA and is supposedly “The Guy in Charge”.
Tweet to @CanRevAgency by all means…the more people they hear from the more “others” will take notice.
Other platforms work, too. Copy your MP…but make some noise and maybe…just maybe…they’ll get it fixed in time for Tax Season. Maybe.
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Done. I did the tweet.
Which tread do you see this?
Seems to be back this morning, at least for me.
ITS WORKINGGGG, finally…
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The mail issues seem to have be caused by updates and changes to the online services by individuals, by business owners, and by representatives.
The first issue happened during a complete redesign of how various mail items are presented.
The second happened after an update to the online system disabled the access to mail.
This is annoying and frustrating to users but is based in lack of sufficient financial investment in the CRA systems to modernize them and provide the level of redundancy that the big banks use. It is very, very hard for the programmers, system designers, testers, and production maintain team to avoid downtime and failures entirely.
Prior to switching to tax preparation and bookkeeping I spent 22 years designing and project managing big financial systems. I worked on TD, Canada Trust, Royal Trust, CIBC, RBC, Hong Kong Bank of Canada, many insurance and investment systems, and more. Some of my projects were conversions. Some were interfaces to the mainframe backends to reporting and lookup for call centres, interactive voice response, online lookup, and online download. Others were adding data warehouses and data marts for various production, reporting, and management purposes. Others were complete conversions from batch to relational database with real time update. Others were little side systems using early AI languages such as LISP and Prolog for risk analysis, optimation, and data analysis. Some were EDI systems for exchange of data between discrete business such as purchase orders, invoices, delivery notices, etc. I am ex IBM.
In the banking world there are many systems to ensure zero errors and no downtime at all. This is extremely costly. These systems includes:
– Standalone pilot systems which consist of three separate systems:- development, test, and production.
– Main production systems which consist of seven systems which in addition addition fully replicated in one or two additional physical locations. The six systems are the three pilot systems for new capabilities, plus three development systems interfacing to the data feeds. We usually performed three test plans, developer testing,end user test, and management testing for interim acceptance before entering and high volume brute force test environment prior to cut-over. Then and only did we go live. Later we created intermediate systems to pull the data from the various mainframe feeds to interface with new development systems. The costs were stratospheric.
I was managing several of very early online banking billpay, interactive voice response, voice recognition, and web access projects. We collaborated with several entities including research departments at universities, hardware developers, software developers, software vendors, and more. In these very early days of telephone and online access during the early to mid 1990’s CRA asked us to investigate the possibility of one or more internal and external facing inquiry systems. We took a look at the high level needs. Performed and high level audit of the various batch mainframe systems required to be interfaced. Designed a high level topology of hardware, software, and locked room raised floor environments required to provide these services. Everyone’s eyes glazed over and deep inhales were had by all was were realized how far behind the CRA systems in the 1990’s. Think 1970’s batch systems. To cost to even begin to bring simple online reporting access had so many zeros that this would be an impossible task based on budget restraints. We thanked everyone for the efforts to cost this out and silently wished whomever would take this on someday good luck.
When all the banks were updating their computer systems new technology and relational databases with new programing languages and new hardware those who relied on old mainframes and batch systems were left behind.
I worked hard with with a fabulous programming dream team at Manulife to update all their systems throughout the 1980’s. I worked with great teams at several banks and other industries.
In my mind it is a miracle that CRA has come as far as it has in such a short time and without access to the deep systems knowledge of those early programmers in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s who designed, documented, and put into production all those base mainframe computer production systems.
So, while I too am frustrated at the downtime, my empathy goes out to those underpaid, overworked, CRA programmers, project managers, and systems maintenance teams whose heads are on the chopping block every time there is a problem.
In this modern world of computerized everything we live and die by the quality of our systems. It takes a stratospheric budget which Canadians are unwilling to fund in order to have zero or near zero down time. The best that we can do is to repair quickly and effectively.
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Yaaaaaay took 2 weeks but it’s finally back up and working.
The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t working, really, the problem was CRA constantly telling everyone there was no issues and to call basic tier agents for help, wasting everyone’s time.
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Same problem. Now I can not download
my NOA.
Again, it’s not working… Ridiculous!
‘Error Code: CC-458: This service is not available at this time. Please try again later.’
I concur. Hopefully they remember the fix so it won’t be down as long this time.
its backkkkk urghhhh