Performance Context: Risks and Challenges

Driving our performance improvement efforts is the need to achieve and maintain high levels of client satisfaction, innovatively responding to the changing needs and expectations of Canadians and their governments. Canadians trust us to let them know about their entitlements and to deliver benefits accurately, consistently, and on time. In our validation and controls activities, we concentrate most of our efforts on areas where the risk of non-compliance may be higher and where more intense scrutiny is required. Provinces, territories, and other federal departments look to us for cost-effective ways of delivering programs to citizens, as well as services to support programs they administer themselves.

To ensure that clients get the right benefit—no more and no less—we need to be aware that the benefit rolls are exposed to risk from both fraudulent claims and under-enrolment. We mitigate the risk of fraud and other improper claims by targeting our validation efforts towards accounts we have identified as high-risk. We mitigate the risk of under-enrolment through outreach activities to ensure that all potential clients are aware of our benefit programs and know how to access them. Maintaining relatively high levels of public confidence in the CCRA's administration of benefit programs during more restrictive economic times will remain a challenge if overall levels of compliance deteriorate.

Relationships between the federal government and provincial and territorial governments are affected by many challenging issues outside of the CCRA's control. If we do not fully use the flexibilities that agency status confers to manage in this environment, we risk not being seen as a key service provider by the provinces and territories. To mitigate this risk, we have continued to increase the capacity of our systems and delivery infrastructure to maintain our ability to respond to our partners' changing needs and priorities. The growth in the number of programs and services that we deliver on behalf of our partners, although incremental, shows that we have been somewhat successful. However, we still need to refine our strategy to take advantage of new partnership opportunities as they arise.

Date modified:

2003-10-29