OTTAWA — An $800-million digital system to collect duties on commercial imports has so many problems that customs agents are relying on manual workarounds two years after it launched, including by using the aging technology the new platform was designed to replace.

On Thursday, auditor general Karen Hogan released a long-awaited report into the system that Canadian business groups had warned was not ready for prime time—and that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly flagged as a trade irritant.

The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) launched the new tool, called the CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management, or CARM, in October 2024. The agency collected $42 billion in duties and taxes on commercial imports in fiscal 2024-25, which makes it the second-largest source of federal revenue after income taxes. The border agency has said its use in the past of aging software and paper-based systems put that money at risk.

The report found CARM is good at its main job: processing commercial import declarations.

It is also woefully inefficient, the audit concluded, which undermines its intended benefits.

In order for the tool to work properly, agency employees developed at least 38 manual workarounds. Some relied on the legacy systems that CARM was designed to replace, which meant delaying the plan to take those offline. “The use of workarounds also meant that compliance processes remained inefficient, as compliance officers required information across multiple systems to perform their work,” the audit found. As of June 2026, the auditor general found those stopgaps were taking up about 92,000 hours of employee time per year.

The early rollout was bumpy, including a series of outages that Canadian businesses blamed for administrative headaches and delays. The report said the CBSA has received an average of 19,000 requests for help per month. By June 2026, the backlog had grown to 4,000 unresolved requests. Some took more than 500 days to resolve.

“These issues are expected to continue until upgrades are completed and funding shortfalls are addressed,” said the report. It also noted the CBSA is unable to assess whether the system is providing Canadians with the expected value for money.

In a response to the report, the CBSA said it plans to phase out the workarounds, which were always meant to be temporary to ensure continuity from one system to the next. It also aims to schedule system-wide maintenance and urgent fixes when they are least likely to disrupt daily trade, noting this method has ensured the system is available to clients “99 per cent of the time.”

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer targeted the digital system in his last two annual reports on foreign trade barriers. Even importers based outside Canada must now register and provide a security deposit before their shipments can be released, Greer noted. However, that is a feature, not a bug, of the new system. Before, non-resident importers were able to have their goods clear customs while waiting for the bill.