LLMMedium
Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) AI Chatbot 'Charlie' Reportedly Gave Incorrect Tax Filing Guidance at Scale
- Occurred
- Dec 12, 2025
- Published
- Dec 12, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Charlie the Chatbot, an AI-powered system deployed by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), has reportedly been providing inaccurate or incomplete tax-related information to members of the public. An audit by the Auditor General of Canada reportedly found the chatbot produced correct responses in fewer than half of tested cases. The system has been publicly available across multiple CRA webpages since March 2020 and reportedly used by millions of users.
Developers
- Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
- Government of Canada
- Generative AI developers
Deployers
- Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
- Government of Canada
Harmed parties
- General public
- General public of Canada
- Epistemic integrity
- Canadian taxpayers
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: AI chatbot provided incorrect tax guidance at scale, representing a notable failure without evidence of life-threatening harm or legal action.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8