Summary of the Corporate Business Plan 2012-2013 to 2014-2015

Introduction

Vision 2020: the CRA transformation agenda

Introduction

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) plays a crucial role in Canada's tax system, protecting the revenue base and maintaining income security essential to the economic and social well-being of Canadians. This is reflected in our mission:

To administer tax, benefits, and related programs, and to ensure compliance on behalf of governments across Canada, thereby contributing to the ongoing economic and social well-being of Canadians.

The CRA exercises its mandate within a framework of complex laws enacted by Parliament and by provincial and territorial legislatures. During 2010-2011, we processed approximately $384 billion in taxes and duties on behalf of Canada, the provinces (except Quebec) and territories, and First Nations. We also delivered over 110 million benefit and credit payments totalling over $22 billion, and provided other services that contributed directly to the well-being of Canadians. In achieving these results, we answered almost 24 million telephone enquiries by agent or automation, and processed over 36 million tax returns. No other public organization touches the lives of Canadians every day more than we do.

This Corporate Business Plan sets out the core programs that we will use to deliver our mission over the next three years. It also sets out the results of our recent strategic planning exercise that established nine clear strategic directions for the CRA and a major transformation agenda, to be launched early in 2012-2013.

The context of change

The Government of Canada has identified five areas of focus in the 2011 Speech from the Throne: the creation of the right conditions for growth and job creation: a stable, predictable, low-tax environment; a highly skilled and flexible workforce; support for innovation and new technologies; and wider access to markets abroad. More recently, the Government of Canada called on all departments and agencies to help reduce the deficit and, as one of the federal government's largest employers, the CRA will be a significant contributor.

The CRA has a strong record of implementing improvements to keep pace with a fast-changing environment. Today's world is one in which businesses must compete globally for talent and markets, services are expected to be available 24/7, from any location and any technology, and governments are under pressure to cut spending while providing top quality, responsive and transparent services to citizens. Tax administration is a key enabler of government objectives in this fast paced environment. Taxpayers' trust and participation in the tax system means that government has the revenue it needs to deliver jobs, growth and security for Canadians. Businesses count on us to be fair, clear and timely in our decisions about tax implications, so that they can move quickly on major decisions, and to minimize their paper burden. Canadians look to us to make it easy and stress-free to pay taxes, using services that fit in with their lifestyle, and to get it right when we pay benefits.

In 2010, we embarked on a comprehensive strategic planning process to keep the CRA in step with government priorities, global trends, technology, and taxpayer behaviour. The result--Vision 2020--is a bridge from today to the future.

Vision 2020

Vision 2020 lays out a long term, transformative suite of nine strategic directions to strengthen and modernize how we administer tax and benefits for Canadians.

Four relate to the range of activities from service to enforcement to recourse that we use to promote and sustain compliance. They describe an evolution in our approach to core business programs:

• Manage Compliance Intelligently;
• Integrate the Taxpayer Experience;
• Early Certainty about Tax Issues; and
• Influence Compliance Attitudes.

Three are levers and describe the tools required to deliver Vision 2020:

• Extend our Reach through Third Parties;
• Drive to Electronic; and
• Better Data, Used Better.

The remaining two are about ensuring we:

• Optimize our Organization's resources; and
• Build the Workforce and the Workplace of the Future.

The CRA has been moving in many of these directions for some time, for example we started providing e-services nearly two decades ago--but Vision 2020 challenges us to go farther, faster, so that we can deliver earlier results for Canadians. Vision 2020 began as a simple question: Are there better, more cost-effective ways for the CRA to meet its mandate? Building on guidance from bodies like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), our own best practices, and those of other leading tax jurisdictions, Vision 2020 sets out the directions that the CRA needs to pursue to continue as a modern, successful tax administration in a global business and tax environment of growing complexity that poses both opportunities and challenges to government and tax administrations internationally.

Transformation agenda

Vision 2020 gives us a clear plan of where we are going and how we will get there. Over the next few years, the CRA will make significant changes to the way it does business so that our compliance activities, our services to the public, and our business processes and resources are aligned with Vision 2020. Early in 2012-2013, we will be launching a set of broad transformative initiatives that will be implemented over the next three years. They will contain the CRA's commitments--which were guided by Vision 2020--arising from the spending review as part of the Government's efforts to reduce the deficit, as well as other major changes that we will introduce to advance Vision 2020 and respond to the broader Government of Canada agenda.

This is an ambitious undertaking, and one that we must deliver on time and on budget. The success of our transformation agenda will depend on the skills, culture, and integrity of our workforce. For some time now the CRA has been moving to build a workforce that is more knowledge-seeking, innovative, values-driven, and focused on results and high performance. Our transformation agenda for compliance and service will take us further in that direction; as automation replaces some traditional areas of work, we will continue to count on highly qualified and experienced staff to deal with complex workloads.

The CRA has a solid track record of successfully delivering major change initiatives; we are building on this legacy to ready ourselves for this transformation. We expect that our Annual Report for 2012-2013 will demonstrate that the CRA is making significant progress toward Vision 2020.

Managing risk

Risk management is an important part of sound corporate governance. It helps organizations ensure that they have planned for the full range of potential circumstances and their possible impact on the organization's objectives. The CRA has a comprehensive enterprise risk management process that enables us to prioritize our efforts to keep risks from occurring or minimize their impact if they are due to unavoidable circumstances such as a natural disaster.

Our enterprise risk management is fully integrated into decision making, planning, and reporting to support the achievement of our strategic outcomes. The commitments in this Corporate Business Plan reflect our response to the identified major risks to the Agency's mandate. We fully expect that, as a result of our effective risk management, the public will continue to maintain its trust in the integrity and diligence of the national tax administration; our IT systems will be reliable and flexible to support our evolving service and compliance needs; we will address non-compliance that poses the greatest threat to Canada's revenue base; and our prudent management of corporate resources will result in a cost-efficient, productive organization.

Date modified:

2012-05-11