A message from the Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer

As the Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), I take pride in being a part of such an outstanding public service organization as it celebrates its tenth anniversary. Looking back, I am inspired by how far we have come and how much we have accomplished during the past decade. We embarked on a program of change to inject fresh ideas into the way we operate and provide service to Canadians. Even though we have been recognized for our innovation and our commitment to service excellence, we know that we cannot simply rely on our past achievements—we can always do better.

Achieving Our Vision

To achieve our vision, we have pursued two overarching objectives—excellence in program delivery and excellence in the workplace. In terms of excellence in program delivery, we met or exceeded many of our targets. For example, we made it easier for callers to reach us through our telephone service; we worked in close partnership with our provincial counterparts in Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec to recover more than half a billion dollars in taxes from unacceptable aggressive tax planning arrangements that crossed provincial boundaries; we expanded electronic options for business users to include GST/HST NETFILE; and we again achieved very strong results related to the delivery of benefit programs.

In terms of the second overarching objective—excellence in the workplace—we have developed and acted upon the first iteration of our Agency Workforce Plan, which fully integrated human resources and business planning. Several initiatives have been acted upon to address challenges identified in the plan. On March 31, 2009, the second iteration of our Agency Workforce Plan (2009-2010 to 2011-2012) was published, aligned with our Corporate Business Plan, which covered the same period.

Overall, our 2008-2009 results related to the administration of tax and benefit programs remain strong. Most taxpayers met the deadline for filing their returns and for paying amounts owing, and most taxable corporations paid amounts due on time.

We need to ensure, however, that more taxable corporations file their returns on time, and that more employers remit source deductions on behalf of employees on time. Taking all these results into consideration, I remain confident that we can overcome the challenges in key high-risk areas over the long term with a view to achieving our vision.

Progress on Priorities

We have in place an ambitious change agenda to respond to the many challenges we face. During 2008-2009, we made important progress in our commitment to excellence, including the following.

Strengthening service – In December 2008, we launched our comprehensive Service Strategy. This strategy is the result of extensive collaboration with internal stakeholders across the country, with the common objective of working in an integrated and horizontal fashion to develop and deliver our products and services.

Enhancing our efforts to address non-compliance – We conducted our second compliance review this past year. Similar to our first review, this compliance review process resulted in identifying five key high-risk priority areas: aggressive tax planning, the underground economy, payment compliance, wilful non-compliance, and contraband tobacco. As well, we undertook further work to implement our Benefits Compliance Strategy Action Plan by researching and analyzing enforcement and deterrence issues in an effort to understand and evaluate the benefits and credits at risk.

Reinforcing trust – Our service complaints framework has recently made redress more comprehensive. This framework has, at its foundation, the Taxpayer Bill of Rights which has been expanded to include eight service rights. Furthermore, we implemented our Service Complaints Program, to provide taxpayers with a formal resolution process for complaints about mistakes, undue delays, and other issues related to service.

Maintaining effective relationships – The strength of our collaborative efforts was demonstrated most recently in the successful conclusion of the Memorandum of Agreement for the harmonization of the Ontario sales tax, the second harmonization initiative that we have undertaken with Ontario. The implementation of corporate tax administration proceeded as planned—on time and within budget.

Meeting our mandate

The overall goal of the CRA is to administer tax, benefits, and related programs and to ensure compliance on behalf of governments across Canada, thereby contributing to the ongoing economic and social well-being of Canadians.

Our employees are known for carrying out their duties with integrity and professionalism. We are an organization that is highly visible—one that touches the lives of all Canadians—and we are very proud of the excellent reputation we’ve earned. The fact that we have once again quickly and accurately delivered on government priorities speaks to the professionalism and dedication of our workforce.

Going forward, we will strive to further our working relationships with federal departments, provinces, and territories to forge links between the social responsibility inherent in paying taxes and the civic rights and benefits enjoyed in Canada. We will sustain our strong international presence in organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Inter-American Centre of Tax Administration to advance protocols and practices to guide the work of tax administrations around the world. We will seek opportunities to reduce the administrative burden and overall cost of government and we will build on our position as an innovative service leader and a separate employer to create a workplace culture of intelligent risk management and innovation.

William V. Baker
Commissioner and Chief Executive Officer
Canada Revenue Agency

Date modified:

2009-11-05