CARM Help Desk's Top Phone Inquiry Is Still "I Can't Get Onboarded"

Government Files is The Canada Report's public-records analysis series examining government documents obtained through Canada's Access to Information (ATI) and provincial Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. These transparency laws allow members of the public to request internal government records from federal and provincial institutions. This article reviews documents released through those processes and summarizes what the records contain and what they show. While we strive for accuracy, this article represents an analysis and interpretation of the source material. For complete accuracy and full context, readers should review the original documents, which are available in full below.

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Years after the Canada Border Services Agency switched importers and customs brokers over to its Assessment and Revenue Management system, the single most common reason people pick up the phone to call the CARM Help Desk is still the most basic one: they cannot get onboarded. Internal records released by the CBSA show that for the period from 1 November 2025 to 24 February 2026, "Onboarding — No case" was the top-ranked topic among the twenty most frequent phone inquiries, and onboarding-related issues appear repeatedly throughout the rest of the list.

The figures come from a response to Access to Information request A-2026-10233, which asked the CBSA for the twenty most frequent inquiries received by the CARM Help Desk through its online portal, alongside the twenty most frequent inquiries that came in by phone and required an officer to dialogue with the caller. The agency disclosed all of the records — three pages covering the roughly sixteen-week window — including the line-of-business codes its officers use to classify calls.

What the Documents Show

The CARM Client Support Helpdesk runs on two channels: a telephone line and a webform for requesting assistance. According to the records, it serves both internal CBSA users and external trade chain partners — the importers, customs brokers and trade consultants who have to file and pay duties through the system.

On the phone side, onboarding dominates. The top-ranked call topic is clients who managed to onboard with help and needed no follow-up case. Sitting just behind it are generic "how-to" questions answered with reference to the CBSA website, followed by questions about the Release Prior to Payment (RPP) programme and the annual review process. The fourth-ranked topic is onboarding that required help with affinity questions — the identity-verification questions a business has to answer to link its account — and that one was significant enough that officers opened a case to follow up. Further down the list sit technical issues with the portal, requests to switch a Business Account Manager or reset multi-factor authentication, and brokers who dialled the wrong queue or needed help onboarding clients of their own.

The webform tells a slightly different story. There, the most frequent topic is financial — questions routed to the CARM finance team about statements of account and payment. Onboarding assistance with the CARM Client Portal ranks second, and the third spot goes to a cluster the CBSA labels account reactivations, legacy program linking and data errors — the kind of problems that arise when information carried over from the old systems does not line up cleanly in the new one. Commercial Accounting Declaration issues, profile and Business Account Manager switches, and EDI/API integration help round out the busier categories.

One detail in the response is worth flagging on its own: although the request asked for the top twenty webform topics, the CBSA notes that its help desk only uses fourteen categories to sort webform requests. The agency explained that the dropdown options clients select when they submit a request often do not reflect the actual help they need, so the help desk applies its own second level of categorization to route the work — and there are only fourteen of those categories in use.

Onboarding Is Still the Bottleneck

Read together, the two lists point to the same conclusion from different angles: getting into the system and proving who you are remains the friction point. On the phone, onboarding-related codes occupy the first, fourth and eighth ranked positions, and the closely related "how-to" and RPP questions sit at second and third. On the webform, portal onboarding is second and the account-reactivation-and-data-errors cluster is third. Whether a trade partner reaches for the phone or the webform, the odds are good that the problem traces back to onboarding, account access or the accuracy of data migrated from the legacy programmes CARM replaced.

That matters because CARM is mandatory infrastructure for anyone importing commercially into Canada. The system is how duties and taxes are assessed and collected, and businesses that cannot complete onboarding or keep their accounts in good standing face real exposure — the same compliance pressure that shows up elsewhere in CBSA's commercial enforcement, where pre-arrival paperwork errors have driven the largest penalties against the trucking industry. A help desk still fielding onboarding calls as its number-one phone topic, more than a year into mandatory use, is a signal about how smoothly that transition has gone.

How the Numbers Are Counted

The CBSA is unusually candid in this release about the limits of its own data, and those caveats matter for anyone reading the rankings as hard fact. For phone calls, the agency uses line-of-business (LOB) codes to track why people call. An officer selects the code that best fits each call, and the records acknowledge a degree of subjectivity in that — an officer may choose the single most appropriate option, or apply several LOB codes to one call. The agency also notes the code list is revised by its CARM Client Support Unit as the mix of questions evolves, describing it as an ongoing and ever-adapting process. The version of the codes included in the release was current as of 21 October 2025.

For the webform, the subjectivity sits with the client rather than the officer. Because people choose dropdown options that may not match the help they actually need, the help desk re-sorts incoming requests using its own fourteen second-level categories to push work to the right team. The practical effect is that the webform rankings reflect how the CBSA triages requests, not necessarily how clients first described them.

What's Missing from the Data

The release answers what people contact the CARM Help Desk about, but not how much or how well. The records contain no call volumes, no figures for how many requests came through each channel, and no wait times or resolution rates. They rank the topics by frequency but do not attach a number to any of them, so it is impossible to tell from this document whether the top phone topic represents a few hundred calls or many thousands, or how far ahead of the second-ranked topic it sits.

The records also do not break the data down by whether the caller was an internal CBSA user or an external trade partner, even though the help desk serves both. And because the line-of-business codes are revised over time, the snapshot reflects a specific roughly sixteen-week window rather than a stable long-run picture. Anyone wanting to know whether onboarding calls are trending down as more businesses settle into the system would need a longer time series than this single release provides.

Where This Fits

This release joins a growing body of CBSA records that The Canada Report has examined through access-to-information requests, from internal logs tracking COVID-19 infections among border staff to the agency's billion-dollar property portfolio. On their own, help-desk topic rankings are a modest dataset. But they offer a rare, officer's-eye view of where a major federal IT transition is still generating friction — and they suggest that for the importers and brokers who depend on CARM every day, the hardest part is often simply getting in the door.

All figures and topic rankings referenced are from the Canada Border Services Agency, Access to Information request A-2026-10233, obtained through Canada's Access to Information process. The records list the twenty most frequent phone topics and the most frequent webform topics handled by the CARM Help Desk between 1 November 2025 and 24 February 2026, along with the agency's line-of-business code definitions.