Our 2006-2007 Results

Our Program Activities

Client Assistance (PA1)

We carry out our Client Assistance program activity to provide taxpayers with the tools, assistance, and information that facilitate voluntary compliance with their tax obligations. To achieve our expected result, we engage in education and outreach programs, respond to enquiries, provide rulings and interpretations, register plans and charities, and administer duty programs for certain commodities.

As demonstrated in our Performance Report Card, it is our assessment that taxpayers continued to have access to timely and accurate information during 2006-2007; therefore, we met our expected result for our Client Assistance program activity. By meeting this result, we made it easier for taxpayers to understand and respond to their registration, filing, remittance, and reporting obligations under Canada’s self-assessment system, thereby facilitating voluntary compliance.

Our Measure: Timely Information

In 2006-2007, it is our overall assessment that the levels of information services we provided continued to meet our expectations for timeliness. For example, we handled over 15 million tax-related public enquiries in 2006-2007 and met our service standards for answering general and business income tax enquiries in a timely fashion. This was achieved due to a one-time, in-year, infusion of resources which helped overcome increased volumes of complex, account-specific calls that required additional time to resolve, dedication of resources to priority lines for both Service Canada and CRA counter sites, and higher than expected call volumes from our Smartlinks initiative. We also met our service standard for charities calls. Coupled with the results we achieved against our accessibility targets (see ), we consider the results achieved against these service standards to be the principal indicator of our success in meeting our expected result because the telephones remain the primary channel through which high volumes of taxpayers seek information from the CRA.

In addition, through our rigorous annual review process, we ensured that new information was accurately incorporated in a timely fashion in our tax related publications--documents that are critical to assisting taxpayers in meeting their legislative, policy, and procedural obligations and receiving their entitlements, in accordance with relevant federal and provincial legislation.

Our resources within the Client Assistance program activity are also focused on informing taxpayers in a timely and effective way about changes in law. Each year, we work with the Department of Finance and co-ordinate proposals for legislative change within the CRA. In 2006-2007, we implemented a number of changes that had been enacted. The most notable example occurred with the implementation of the 1% reduction in the GST/HST, which became effective July 1, 2006. We participated in the drafting of the 2007 federal budget’s legislative measures, such as the new Child Tax Credit and the series of tax relief measures in support of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Our work in these areas helps to ensure that proposed legislative amendments simplify and clarify the law, are administratively feasible, consider the burden on taxpayers, strengthen enforcement, and improve administrative efficiency. Each of these principles promotes voluntary compliance, and helps protect Canada’s revenue base.

With respect to GST/HST rulings, we introduced a new service standard in 2006-2007 to provide written responses to GST/HST technical enquiries within 45 working days of receipt of the request. We exceeded our 75% target for responding to over 4,400 requests by issuing a timely response 87% of the time.

One area where improvement is needed in meeting our service standards is the provision of income tax technical interpretations within an average of 90 days. Our decision to focus our efforts on older files resulted in an increase in our average to 105 days for the more than 2,400 technical interpretations we provided this past year (see Figure 9). With this one-time effort complete, our performance in issuing technical interpretations over the coming year should improve.

Another area that requires improvement is in meeting our service standard for issuing advance income tax rulings within an average of 60 days. We issued over 300 income tax rulings in 2006-2007 and, from an average of 114 days during the first quarter, our performance against our service standard steadily improved to an average of 94 days by the end of the fiscal year (see Figure 9). We expect this trend to continue next year with the hiring of additional resources, which is currently underway.

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

It is important to resolve our performance issues in regard to these two service standards because, while only a comparatively small number of taxpayers were affected by those services, providing less timely service in these areas may result in these taxpayers undertaking questionable transactions--potentially leading to reduced compliance and more costly audit and appeals activities.

We also deliver timely services to other federal government departments where the benefit to the taxpayer accrues indirectly. One example of this is the service we provide to Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC) related to the CPP and EI. In 2006-2007, we again met the 85% service level for the timely completion of over 70,000 ruling requests set out in the memorandum of understanding. We view our results in fulfilling this long-standing service level agreement to be the fundamental indicator of our timeliness in delivering service to our clients.

Our Measure: Accurate Information

Providing accurate information to taxpayers is critical for them to comply with their obligations to self-assess and report their tax liability to the CRA. The single quantitative indicator we use to determine if our information services are accurate is our evaluation of the reliability of our telephone services. Results from our accuracy survey indicate that performance in responding to the tens of millions of telephone enquiries received in 2006-2007 remained high, relative to the 1996-1997 baseline year[Footnote 1] . We believe that the result we achieved against this key indicator gives us a sufficient degree of assurance to conclude that we provide taxpayers with accurate information.

Our Measure: Accessible Information

If taxpayers were not able to access the information, tools, and assistance we provide in a manner responsive to their needs, the value of timely and accurate services would be compromised. Overall, results against our key indicators for accessibility demonstrate that taxpayers continue to have the necessary access to the services they need to meet their obligations under Canada’s tax system. In our judgment, we have met our accessibility expectations.

We rely on results achieved against our caller accessibility targets for general, business, and charities telephone enquiries to judge whether or not taxpayers have the necessary access to our information services. As noted in our Performance Report Card, we exceeded our 80% targets for these high-volume enquiries during 2006-2007--attaining 83% for general enquiries, 86% for business enquiries, and 96% for charities enquiries.

The continued consolidation of our call centres into centres of expertise and the implementation of national telephone networks during the past year have helped to maximize program efficiencies. For example, our Smartlinks service aligns telephone and Web service delivery channels, allowing taxpayers using our site to connect directly to selected call centre agents. Feedback on the service is used to improve content and navigation, further enhancing this self-serve option.

Our Web site is another key element of our strategy to enhance taxpayer accessibility to the information they need and thereby help them to meet their compliance obligations. The number of visits to the CRA Web site in 2006-2007 (over 36 million) exceeded expectations and the number of publication downloads (over 61 million) increased from last year.

In 2006-2007, we worked to increase our visibility in the community through activities such as working with the Action Task Force on Small Business Issues, community visits, and involvement in trade shows. The following are some additional examples.

• The CRA led more than 1,000 outreach events involving more than 55,000 participants to provide information on benefits and entitlements to individuals such as current and potential child benefit recipients, students, and newcomers to Canada.
• We presented almost 1,100 outreach events for businesses--involving more than 23,000 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.
• A total of 358 visits were made to provide exporters of softwood lumber products with information about their rights and obligations under the new Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006.

Overall, we believe we have met our expectations related to the enhancement of our alternative information sources to expand the range and accuracy of our communications products.

A Snapshot of Client Assistance (PA1)

Figure 10 Resource Spending

Description

In 2006-2007, spending for this program activity totalled $319.6 million (4,06 FTEs) or 9.4% of the CRA’s overall expenditures (Figure 10).[Footnote 1] Of this $319.6 million, $214.7 million was for net program expenditures and $104.9 million was allocated to this program activity for corporate services. Work within this program activity is undertaken through several Call Centres and 48 TSOs across Canada.

Performance Report Card

Timely Information

Accurate Information

Accessible Information

[Footnote 1] We are cautious in attributing too much significance to the results of the accuracy survey due to a change in methodology, the limited scope of the survey, and a reduction in sample sizes.

Date modified:

2007-11-01