Tax Services

Expected Outcome

Performance Summary – We have met this Anticipated Result, as demonstrated by the following performance against expectations:

• increased use of our enhanced Web site and electronic service offerings, reducing the need for clients to call
• effectively implemented and communicated legislative changes within required timeframes
• improved overall performance against our service standards
• processed beneficial adjustments for approximately 175,000 taxpayers
• improved client awareness of the SR&ED program

A. Providing Timely, Accessible, Reliable, and Responsive Service to Clients

On balance, clients continued to have timely, reliable and responsive access to information via service channels of their choice. We have made extensive enhancements to our electronic service offerings. Our Web site offers easier navigation, increased search capability, and improved access to information to better meet the needs of clients such as: seniors, tax professionals, charities, non-residents, and self-employed individuals. We have also expanded our Interactive Information Service (IIS), which provides tailored responses to client questions on various topics. In addition, individuals can check the status of their refund and update their addresses through our Web site, and options are available to both individuals and businesses for making online payments, via financial institutions, to the CCRA. Client usage of the tax-related portion of our Web site has continued to grow and is now nearly triple the 2000-2001 level (Fig. 1-1).

Through our continuing efforts to provide more comprehensive and responsive online services, we have been able to reduce the need for clients to call or visit our offices for simple enquiries. However, the calls are becoming more complex—on average 4% longer. The number of unique callers declined by about 4% in 2001-2002 and by another 3.1% this year. Our call centre agents are increasingly available to respond to more time-consuming, complex calls and client-specific enquiries, and their accuracy continues to improve, based on sampling.

1-1 Tax-Related Usage of the CCRA Web site

Accessibility rates for our general and business telephone enquiries services continue to be on target ( Fig. 1-2 ), with particularly high rates achieved during our peak season when the majority of clients called us. We accomplished this in part by ensuring that knowledgeable workers were more readily available. This means that the vast majority of callers were able to reach our telephone services, it does not imply that they were successful in their first attempt. However, once callers were in queue to speak to an agent, our timeliness in answering calls was slightly below our internal performance target of answering 80% of calls within two minutes.

1-2 Telephone Caller Accessibility

Our service standards for Tax Services currently focus on timeliness. We added six new service standards this year, and our overall performance against our service standards improved slightly (3.6 percentage points) with 59% of all service standards met, exceeded, or mostly met. However, we met or exceeded, or mostly met all seven of our most important standards, such as processing fairness requests, providing advance income tax rulings to taxpayers and processing individual, corporate, and GST/HST returns. Schedule E provides a detailed listing of our performance against the service standards.

We successfully implemented major legislative changes within required timeframes and through our rigorous and highly structured annual publications review process, we ensured that any new or changed information and legislation was accurately incorporated in time to meet our critical delivery targets for over 1,000 tax-related publications.

Our 2002 Annual Survey indicates a decline in the overall rating of Tax Services to 69% from 74% in 2001-2002. However, the 2002 Citizens First Survey¹ indicates that our service quality rating by Canadians has improved by four points since 2000, from 55 to 59 on a 100 point scale. We will continue to monitor trends over the coming years to determine whether our service improvements are achieving the expected positive impact on overall client satisfaction.

B. Ensuring Fairness

The CCRA strives to collect the correct amount of tax—neither too much nor too little. As part of the individual/employer tax-matching effort, we refunded $50.6 million to some 175,000 individuals who understated the amount of taxes prepaid through employers' withholding of source deductions, a decrease of $7.4 million for approximately 41,000 fewer taxpayers from the previous year. In support of fairness, the CCRA forgave an estimated total of $321 million in interest and penalties for extenuating circumstances such as financial hardship, including $257 million pertaining to Tax Services ($245 million in the previous year). We met our service standard for processing requests for cancellations and waivers. While much of the day-to-day administration of fairness in the CCRA is conducted within Tax Services' various programs, the overall responsibility for coordination of the Fairness Initiative falls under the Appeals business line.

Through our rulings and technical interpretation services, we responded to over 6,000 requests on income tax, excise duties, and GST/HST legislation. We provided a survey to all external advance income tax ruling and technical interpretation clients who received a written response. Of the clients that responded, 96% were satisfied with the level of service they received.

To enhance fairness, new regulations for licensing and registration were implemented in advance of the Excise Act, 2001 coming into force for the benefit of clients. As well, amendments to the GST New Housing Rebate were made to permit approvals of rebate applications for owner-built homes after the period otherwise allowed.

The SR&ED program is the largest federally supported incentive program for industrial research and development in Canada, currently serving some 11,000 claimants each year and providing an estimated $1.6 billion in tax credits. We took steps to increase program awareness and established a partnership committee with private sector representatives. The Preclaim Project Review (PCPR) and the Account Executive services demonstrate our commitment to being more responsive to the needs of Canadian businesses. The PCPR service provides an up-front review and a preliminary opinion of eligibility, which helps businesses with planning and investment decisions before the incentive is claimed. We completed 1,010 PCPRs this year. The number of companies taking advantage of Account Executive services increased by 23% this year to 1,037. To further improve client awareness of the SR&ED program, two key documents dealing with experimental development and the supporting of technical aspects of a claim were developed and are available on our Web site.

Date modified:

2003-10-29