Executive Summary

Internal services enable business lines to maximize performance and operations

The Board of Management, which became part of the CRA's governance structure when it became an agency in 1999, is responsible for overseeing the organization and administration of the CRA and the management of its resources, services, property, personnel and contracts. It is also responsible for approving the Corporate Business Plan, which establishes the objectives on which this document reports. With membership from private business across Canada, the Board also brings a private sector perspective to the CRA's work, and performs a healthy challenge role to senior management.

The strengthening of financial management is a key priority at the CRA. In 2004-2005 the CRA spent $3,051 million of its $3,226 million budget, a lapse of $175 million, or 5.4% of budget. While workload volumes have increased in some areas, and labour negotiations were settled with the largest union in 2004-2005, financial expenditures remained relatively stable, increasing by $105 million or about 3.6% over last year. We have also introduced various initiatives and reviews aimed at improving efficiency, such as modernizing employee compensation services, and these measures are contributing to savings in operating expenditures.

As part of our resource management strategy, where possible, we limited administrative overhead spending and reallocated funding to program priorities. The initiatives that we undertook upon becoming an agency, such as those to reform procurement, contracting and other administrative activities, are largely complete. Through these reforms, savings have been identified and our processes have improved. Our human resource management initiatives continue to mature. This has included developing strategies to address the impact of the expenditure review and to deal with future requirements for more knowledge workers.

In support of program delivery, our information technology (IT) services continued to deliver high levels of IT service availability of the applications, infrastructure and network services that are needed for operational capability in a secure environment. At the same time, we took steps to strengthen the security, monitoring and control features in our financial systems to respond to Auditor General's concerns about financial system controls. With continuous expansion and improvements in our online services, once again we were recognized for our IT performance with six awards from the Government Technology Exhibition Conference (GTEC).

Date modified:

2005-10-26