Highlights — Appeals

Innovating for the Future

The Appeals business line oversees one of the largest redress and dispute resolution services in Canada. We review contested decisions relating to tax, customs, trade administration, employment insurance, and Canada Pension issues. We also co-ordinate the CCRA's Fairness initiative and administer the Voluntary Disclosures Program, which allows clients to correct past errors or omissions in their tax, duty, and tariff obligations without penalty.

As part of our ongoing commitment to high quality and responsive service, we continue to make improvements to our redress system. Our aim is to provide clients with a process that is fair and impartial, accessible, transparent, and timely.

Some of our initiatives for the 2003-2004 to 2005-2006 planning period include:

• modifying our Appeals Information and Reporting System (AIRS), to enable more effective tracking and reporting of our inventories;
  
  
• in 2003, bringing the new Globus-Case system on line, which will result in more effective tracking and reporting of dispute and litigation workloads for tax programs; and
  
  
• making the electronic filing of disputes available in 2003-2004 for the income tax and GST/HST/excise tax programs.

We also plan to conduct a national client survey to help us assess client satisfaction, and to identify opportunities to improve our performance in areas such as timeliness, transparency, and cost.

Managing Compliance

The outcome we seek in Appeals is that Canadians receive an impartial and timely review of contested decisions through our redress system.

Key Volumetrics

To earn and keep the trust of clients and to promote voluntary compliance, it is imperative that our redress process is seen as being fair. Basic aspects of fairness include ensuring that clients are informed of their rights and how to exercise them, and making sure that the process is timely, accessible, and consistent.

Priorities for the planning period include:

• reducing turnaround times;
  
  
• ensuring that the fairness provisions are applied consistently throughout the CCRA;
  
  
• reducing the backlog of unprocessed inventory under the Voluntary Disclosures program;
  
  
• fully implementing a Risk Management Framework that will assist us in improving our capacity to promote the consistent, fair, and timely resolution of disputes and litigation; and
  
  
• having in place a sufficient number of skilled and knowledgeable staff to handle the workload volumes.

The following table identifies the anticipated results and success criteria that have been developed, and which will guide the Appeals business line over the planning period.

Expected outcome —
Canadians receive an impartial and timely review of contested decisions through our redress system.

Anticipated Results	Success Criteria
The redress process is transparent, accessible, and fair	Meet the enhanced 85% service standard for contacting clients who file disputes with a meaningful status update within 30 days of filing Achieve an overall client satisfaction rating of at least 10% higher than the 1998 survey result
The redress process is timely	Meet case completion targets established as part of the three-year timeliness initiative
Fairness provisions are applied consistently across the agency	CCRA monitoring programs confirm that the fairness provisions are being applied consistently agency-wide
Risk management is effective for dispute and litigation issues	Full implementation of an appeals risk management framework by December 2003 On average, 90% of all disputes continue to be resolved before reaching the courts (not counting CPP/EI disputes) The majority of decisions appealed to the courts continue to be resolved in favour of the CCRA Implementation of new programs for quality assurance and monitoring the consistency in the application of policies and legislation in the decisions on cases, beginning in 2002-2003
Knowledgeable and skilled workforce in the right place at the right time	Reducing our staffing shortage to a level of no more than 5% of allowed funding

Previous page | Next page

Date modified:

2003-07-03