I am in the middle of readying taxes on my computer. I thought that before I hit the button to submit the electronic return, I'd check to see if the Canada Revenue Agency had my correct bank account information. I'm due for a bit of my hard earned money back and I wanted to make use of direct deposit. This task involved logging onto www.cra.ga.ca/myaccount. Of course, I did not take the time to jot down my account information the last time. That was a whole year ago but I can hardly chalk this up to government inefficiency, can I? So, I had to re-create a government e-pass.Reactivating involves entering a few short pages of data. I didn't take long. However Canada Revenue is set up to work with the separate, mega-interdepartmental e-pass information. The problem is every time I tried to use my new e-pass the site would either time out, or I'd be sent back to a re-logon page. Users need specific CRA authentication, even with a a valid e-pass. Unfortunately, the whole process seems about as clear and intuitive as mud.
If a private company were this inefficient it'd go out of business, but there's little chance of this happening with the federal government. There is simply no reason to be efficient when you're the only game in town.