Conclusions Against Expected Outcomes

We have two expected outcomes:

Canadians receive their rightful share of entitlements – It is critical that we provide Canadians with the right tools and information so that they can provide us with the information we need to register them on the appropriate benefit rolls and ensure they receive timely and accurate benefit payments. Canadians are likely to access these programs if they are informed about them and have a clear understanding of what they need to do to receive benefits. Our communications and benefit delivery services, accompanied by review activities to verify eligibility and entitlements, are directed to ensure that qualifying families and individuals get their rightful share—only to those recipients who are eligible to receive benefits and credits, and the amounts they receive are correct in accordance with the legislation.

Provinces, territories, and other government departments rely on the CCRA as a key service provider – Our legislative flexibilities as an agency and the adaptability of our systems enable us to provide Canadians with a greater range of services on behalf of provinces, territories, and other government departments to reduce overall cost to taxpayers and eliminate duplication.

On balance, our performance indicates that we mostly met our first expected outcome and that we met expectations in the third year of our five-year innovation agenda against the second expected outcome.

In the area of program delivery, we successfully implemented the GST/HST Credit Responsiveness Initiative in July 2002, which allows the quarterly credit amount to respond to in-year changes in client circumstances. This is the most significant change to the credit since it was introduced in 1989.

To ensure that Canadians receive their rightful share of entitlements, we engage in a range of communications activities tailored to meet the diverse information needs of our client base. To help reduce our clients' need to call, we added new features to our Child and Family Benefits Web site; use of the site increased overall by 50%. As telephone call volumes decreased by almost 10%, our strategy of providing alternative channels to access information seems to be working. For individual clients who still call us to get information about their own accounts, we met our target range for CCTB callers, but our accessibility for GST/HST credit callers declined well below the target range.

Again this year, we achieved a strong performance in issuing (via PWGSC) over 99% of our 68 million CCTB payments and GST/HST credit payments on time. In addition, our studies show that we met our service standard by processing 98% of new CCTB applications and issuing first payments within two months. Our survey findings suggest that client satisfaction with all elements of the CCTB application process has been maintained. We have also made a significant improvement in account maintenance activities, by processing 87% of client correspondence within 20 days and 97% of adjustments requiring a notice by the end of the second month after we received the client's enquiry (mostly meeting the target of 98%). As for accuracy, we estimate that rates of 99% for both initial benefit applications and account maintenance activities were achieved. We are continuing our multi-year agenda to ensure the accuracy of the benefit rolls and identify areas of non-compliance. By adjusting benefit levels and other client information in 34.1% of cases reviewed, we know our efforts to improve targeting of higher risk accounts are working.

We have also continued to make progress in our business development strategy to have provinces, territories, and other government departments rely on the CCRA as a key service provider. During the year, we negotiated to implement the Nova Scotia Taxpayer Refund for delivery in June 2003. We put Business Number partnerships in place with three more provinces, and implemented the first phase of a new Data Exchange initiative using File Transfer Protocol to enhance the Income Verification program support we provide for 25 provincial ministries. Accountability to our partners was strengthened through the delivery of our Commissioner's Annual Reports, as well as through the signing of three more Service Management Framework agreements. Despite these accomplishments, we need to achieve further progress by pursuing opportunities to deliver additional types of new programs and services, such as through partnerships with Workers' Compensation Boards and the administration of other major tax programs.

The next section presents our Performance Summary for the Benefit Programs and Other Services business line against our four anticipated results. Anticipated Results 1, 2, and 3 deal with our strategic outcome of managing the compliance continuum, while Anticipated Result 4 relates to our strategic outcome of innovating for the future. These anticipated results support our two expected outcomes.

Performance Highlights

Key Volumetrics

Date modified:

2003-10-29