A message from the Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer

As Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer, I am accountable to the Minister of National Revenue for all program matters, and to our Board of Management for administrative matters. I am proud to report that the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has once again demonstrated its capacity to achieve meaningful and measurable results for Canadians. While we recognize that we have more to do in some areas, our achievements during this past year provide further evidence of the strength of our core business expertise: administering taxes, collecting revenues, and delivering benefits.

The CRA touches the lives of more Canadians than any other single department or agency in the country. In 2009-2010 we processed about $358 billion in taxes and duties and delivered over $17 billion in benefits and credits to millions of individuals and businesses on behalf of Canada’s provinces, territories, other federal departments, and First Nations.

Our 2009-2010 results

During 2009-2010, the CRA placed significant emphasis on ensuring the integrity of Canada’s tax and benefits system. We encouraged compliance with tax legislation by designing initiatives that make it harder for individuals and business not to comply. For example, over the past year we successfully targeted areas like aggressive tax planning and tax havens through partnerships with provinces and international tax administrations, and further refined our risk assessment and management tools. Overall, individuals, corporations, businesses that collect GST/HST, and employers continued to demonstrate strong levels of voluntary compliance with their registration, filing, and remittance obligations. Our robust system of checks and balances, coupled with the legislative and other compliance tools available to us, provide assurance that Canada’s revenue base is being protected.

We continued to strengthen service as a means of increasing levels of voluntary compliance. In 2009-2010, we took further steps to make it easier for Canadians to comply by improving access to tax and benefit information and interactive tools.

In our day-to-day activities, we met most of our performance targets for 2009-2010. For those that we did not meet, we sought to understand the factors involved—such as the recent economic downturn—to identify steps we can take to improve performance in the future.

One particular challenge that we face, which is shared by tax administrations worldwide, is the measurement of the impact of our activities to detect and address non-compliance. Although we continue to achieve strong ratings overall for our performance management framework, we recognize the need to further refine this area.

Moving forward

November 2009 marked the end of our first decade as an agency. The programs and services that we provided over the last 10 years made an important difference in the lives of Canadians. We took on new business, developed and adapted how we worked, built on our management initiatives, and ensured that we continued to deliver on the expectations and needs of taxpayers, businesses, and our government clients. None of this would have been possible without the dedication and hard work of our skilled employees. Their collective knowledge will continue to help us provide innovative and efficient services to individuals and businesses on behalf of the Government of Canada, other levels of government, and First Nations communities.

Our reputation as a world-class tax administration is well-earned and we are proud of our accomplishments over the past year. In submitting this report to the Minister for tabling to Parliament, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all of my coworkers, managers, and union leaders who have made the CRA’s successes possible. As we move forward, I remain confident in the dedication, knowledge, and professionalism of our employees as they deliver quality results that matter to Canadians.

Linda Lizotte-MacPherson
Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer
Canada Revenue Agency

Date modified:

2010-11-02