Promoting compliance

Our core business

Our objective is to ensure Canadians have access to the information they need to voluntarily comply with Canada's tax laws. We conduct outreach activities so that taxpayers, benefit recipients, and particular subgroups receive compliance messages and information and are reminded of their obligations and entitlements. We provide an impartial and responsive redress and dispute resolution process to address tax or service related concerns and offer the Voluntary Disclosures Program to encourage taxpayers to correct past errors or omissions.

Over the planning period, we will measure our success in promoting compliance by comparing our results against external service standards, Footnote 1 as well as the following performance indicators and targets.

Trends and challenges

• Communication messages and compliance activities have resulted in a 49% increase in domestic disclosures between fiscal years 2007-2008 and 2009-2010, with disclosures relating to offshore income rising some 68% in the same period. The combined unreported income identified by the Voluntary Disclosures Program in 2009-2010 was $1.8 billion compared to $777 million in 2007-2008.
• The CRA's focus on aggressive tax planning over the last few years and the successful identification of tax schemes have resulted in an increase in the number of disputes filed with the CRA.
• Information technology continues to be critical in advancing our role in promoting compliance. We will need to adapt our traditional approaches to communicating compliance messages to take advantage of innovative technology-based delivery mechanisms.

Over the planning period, we will undertake the following initiatives to address the challenges we face in promoting compliance.

Outreach

To ensure our outreach efforts are directed to the most appropriate audience (for example seniors, new Canadians, persons with disabilities, or small businesses), we identify segments and topics on which to focus our outreach using public opinion research, demographic analysis, business trends, environmental scans, and compliance risk analysis.

Over the planning period, we will explore ways to improve voluntary compliance through an enhanced understanding of how to promote responsible citizenship.

Optimize redress workload distribution

The CRA's focus on aggressive tax planning has led to larger volumes of objections from those who participated in them, placing pressure on our business capacity. We will allocate more resources to ensure workloads flow effectively to existing capacity. We will take full advantage of our existing resource base, capitalize on established centres of expertise, and build on the recent business process change that allowed our less complex workload to be distributed nationally. These steps will help to optimize workload distribution to ensure the best possible match is created between workloads and resolution capacity.

Resolve service complaints

The CRA Service Complaints Program provides taxpayers with a key point of contact within the CRA for service‑related issues.

We are currently analyzing trends for service-related issues and will use this information, in conjunction with findings from the Taxpayers' Ombudsman, to improve service to Canadians.

Deliverables

The following table lists the initiative and the associated deliverables that we will undertake over the planning period to promote compliance.

Footnote 1

Please visit www.cra.gc.ca/annualreport for a complete list of CRA external service standards.