Our 2007-2008 Results

Our Program Activities

Taxpayer and Business Assistance (PA1)

Overview

The Taxpayer and Business Assistance program activity assists taxpayers, businesses, and registrants in meeting their obligations under Canada’s self-assessment system, by providing accurate and timely responses to their enquiries. Taxpayers have access to the information they need through a variety of channels (e.g. our Web site, telephones, paper publications, appointments, and outreach). In addition, we provide rulings and interpretations to clarify and interpret tax laws and to administer federal tax legislation governing registered plans and charities.

We carry out this program activity to achieve the following expected result:

Our Measure: Timely information

The telephone remains a popular channel through which taxpayers seek information from the CRA. During 2007-2008, we handled over 16 million tax-related public enquiries, including answering enquiries in support of our Corporate Tax Administration for Ontario (CTAO) initiative. Accordingly, the timeliness with which we are able to respond to taxpayer telephone enquiries is our key measure.

We met our service standards for answering general and business tax enquiries in a timely manner, achieving 83% and 82% respectively in 2007-2008. With respect to charities enquiries, where calls are now segregated between the simple and the complex, our 80% target was exceeded for both types.

We also consider it important to update our information channels to reflect the most up-to-date legislative information for individuals and businesses. For example, following the October 30, 2007, Economic Statement issued by the Minister of Finance, we made changes to more than 500 electronic and 100 paper products in a timely fashion.These changes were also incorporated into 12 million individual tax packages distributed to taxpayers in time for the 2007 filing season. Our rigorous annual review process also ensured that all other new information was accurately incorporated in a timely fashion into our tax-related electronic and paper information products, as well as on our Web site.

During 2007-2008, we completed the transformation of our in-person service to service by appointment at our Tax Services Offices (TSOs). This change, along with the implementation of our related service delivery strategy to encourage a shift in taxpayer usage toward more cost-effective self-service options, resulted in a 53% reduction of enquiries handled by agents at our TSOs.

We have a service standard in place to respond to written requests for GST/HST rulings and interpretations within 45 working days of receipt of the request. In 2007-2008, 89% of GST/HST rulings and interpretations were completed within this time frame, exceeding our established target of 75%. Since our past performance has consistently exceeded the existing target, we are raising our target for this service standard to 80% for 2008-2009.

We achieved some improvement in meeting our service standard for the provision of technical income tax interpretations. In 2007-2008, our turnaround times improved to 89 days on average from the previous year’s average of 105 days. Resources which had been diverted in 2006-2007 to deal with old files, were once again applied to current inventory resulting in a performance improvement this year.

There is still a need for improvement in meeting our service standard for issuing advance income tax rulings. The number of days to provide advance income tax rulings increased to 101 days in 2007-2008, taking 68% longer than our target of 60 days and 7% longer when compared with 2006-2007. The increase over last year is principally the result of the closure of several very old rulings files.The hiring and training of additional staff throughout 2007-2008 is anticipated to aid in reducing the number of days required to complete this highly specialized workload in the future.

Figure 9 Timely Response to Requests for Advance Income Tax Rulings and Technical Interpretations

We also deliver timely services to other federal government departments. An example of the service we provide relates to the CPP/EI rulings work we perform on behalf of Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC). In 2007-2008, we again exceeded the 85% service level for the timely completion of ruling requests, achieving 93%.

These results demonstrate that some of these service standards are showing improved results; however, our performance in issuing advance income tax rulings needs to improve. Providing less timely service could result in taxpayers undertaking questionable transactions, potentially leading to reduced compliance and more costly audit and appeals activities.

Our Measure: Accurate information

Providing accurate information to taxpayers is critical in helping them to comply with their obligations to self-assess and report their tax liability to the CRA. To ensure that the information that we provide is accurate, we use qualitative and quantitative quality assurance techniques that provide ongoing, timely feedback to our agents. One example of this is our internal quality listening and coaching program. We also conduct a survey on our telephone enquiries lines, which poses questions based on selected non-account-specific enquiry topics. The results from our ongoing quality monitoring programs indicate that accuracy is assured as a key element of providing quality enquiries services.

Our Measure: Accessible information

Taxpayers need to be able to access the information, tools and assistance we provide in a manner that responds to their needs. We rely on results achieved against our caller accessibility targets for general, business, and charities telephone enquiries to gauge our success.

In 2007-2008, we exceeded our 80% target for general and charities enquiries, attaining 84% and 93% respectively. However, we fell just short of our 80% target for business enquiries, achieving 79%. A significant factor to this result was a higher than anticipated number of enquiries resulting from the redesign of the GST/HST system and the introduction of harmonized legislation initiatives (see PA2 for details on our GST/HST system redesign implementation).

Telephone accessibility is a priority for the CRA. As noted in the chapter entitled Achieving Our Tax Services Strategic Outcome, internal resource reallocations were made during this past year to increase telephone caller accessibility targets from 80% to 90% for 2008-2009.

Our Web site is another key element of our strategy to enhance accessibility to the information taxpayers need and thereby help them to meet their compliance obligations.

Our Smartlinks service aligns telephone and Internet service delivery channels by linking users of our Web site tax information for individuals and businesses to our telephone service. Real-time user feedback helps us identify problems and improve Web content. In 2007-2008, in response to enquiries we received, we expanded our Smartlinks service by adding new links to selected Web pages for individuals. This program encourages the use of the CRA Web site as a self-service information resource for taxpayers.

The number of visits to the pages of our Web site regarding tax information for individuals and businesses continues to climb, with more than 14.7 million visits in 2007-2008. We believe that the increased traffic is the result of the enhancements made to our Web site.

An examination of changing demographics and economic trends led us to concentrate our outreach strategy on individuals within four key sectors (youth, First Nations, newcomers to Canada, and small and medium-sized enterprises). Many of these individuals were new to the tax system, and reaching out to these Canadians improves their access to our products and services, and helps ensure that they are made aware of their responsibilities and entitlements under Canada’s tax legislation.

Our outreach activities increase our visibility in the community. In 2007-2008, we undertook the following:

• we conducted 1,287 outreach events, involving more than 58,000 participants, to provide information on benefits and entitlements to individuals such as current and potential child benefit recipients, students, and newcomers to Canada; and
• we presented approximately 1,200 outreach events for businesses—involving close to 30,000 participants—to support the business community by facilitating compliance for such groups as small businesses, GST/HST/PST registrants, and potential business e-service users.

We expect that the implementation of our outreach strategies will improve compliance among these population sectors by increasing awareness of their requirements to comply.

We are also committed to improving access to information services for key sectors, including: charities, pension plan administrators, exporters, tobacco manufacturers and others, to increase compliance with applicable areas of tax regulation.

In 2007-2008, access to charities program information on the Charities pages of our Web site was enhanced, including a new section tailored specifically for donors. The Web site now contains, for example, a section entitled ‘Operating a Registered Charity’ and a checklist for charities to follow.

The results against our key indicators for accessibility demonstrate that taxpayers continue to have the access to the services they need to meet their obligations under Canada’s tax system. In addition, the innovations that we are implementing will have a positive influence on our ability to meet Canadians’ expectations in the future.

Performance Report Card

Timely Information

Accurate Information

Accessible Information

Date modified:

2009-01-29