The CCRA's Key Challenges

Delivering on our expected outcomes and achieving performance improvements strengthens the CCRA's overall ability to address a number of major challenges in our operating environment.

Our progress in modernizing border control systems and processes helps ensure that the Government of Canada addresses the threat of terrorism without unduly penalizing legitimate travellers, or undermining the efficient and timely flow of commercial goods across our borders.

Our targets for service improvement in Appeals, to reduce the time taken to resolve disputes and to apply the fairness provisions more consistently, coupled with our efforts in Tax Services and Benefit Programs to target high-risk areas to reduce non-compliance, are central to ensuring that the CCRA both delivers on its mandate and responds effectively to economic factors, such as changes in the business cycle. These factors have an impact on the demand for relief from penalties and interest, for example, and on tax compliance.

Our efforts to be more client-oriented and to make service satisfaction a key performance indicator are one way we are responding to demographic trends in our client base. As Canadians age and the diversity of the Canadian population increases, we need to continuously improve our ability to be responsive to the needs and circumstances of our clients. This includes our own HR profile, and the diversity of our workforce. The more representative we are of the Canadians we serve, the more capable we will be of responding to their needs and expectations.

As business continues to expand into the global economy, the CCRA will need to be able to move forward to remain at the forefront of electronic commerce through innovative policies and practices. New technologies offer dramatic potential to provide more comprehensive, more convenient, and more accurate service, at less cost. However, they also pose new compliance risks. We must ensure that our audit, validation, and control programs, and the IT systems that support them, are sufficiently sophisticated and robust to address this challenge.

All these trends mean that pressure is building on governments at all levels to respond in more client-oriented ways to an increasingly diverse range of needs and expectations. Greater economies of scale must be achieved with respect to public expenditures that support government administrative processes. For the federal government, improved relationships with the provinces and territories offer tremendous opportunities to develop more “single window” service-delivery arrangements, which will produce savings for the taxpayer and better program results for governments.

Driving performance improvement across all our business lines is the need to achieve tangible administrative and human resources reform and renewal. This is all the more crucial given that our workload fluctuates over time, due largely to the operating challenges mentioned above. We must ensure that we maintain adequate resource levels and that the resource adjustments (i.e., increases) made in 2001-2002 have maximum impact on our performance and service levels. To do so means strengthening our administrative capacities, including our ability to accurately identify and quantify workload “drivers” on a timely basis.

Delivering better results for our clients and partners on the “outside” demands that we achieve these kinds of demonstrable performance improvements on the “inside.” To ensure we can and do address the challenges we face in our operating environment, we must strive for excellence in our internal administrative processes, and in our people.

Date modified:

2002-11-07