Moving Forward

Delivering on Our First Five Years as an Agency

Our Corporate Business Plan (2002-2003 to 2004-2005) establishes our strategic direction and priorities for the next three years. It sets out our four change objectives for our innovation agenda, as well as our plans to ensure that our day-to-day operations deliver high overall levels of compliance with the filing, border, remittance, and reporting obligations of businesses, Canadians, and travellers.

It establishes as a top priority, across all our business lines, the need to refine the criteria we use to assess performance, to make them more precise and more focused on outcomes, or results. This Annual Report is part of the process underway to meet that priority. While more work needs to be done, the performance criteria in this, our second Annual Report, are generally more descriptive and more results-oriented than last year.

We have made demonstrable progress in all of the areas we identified for improvement in the Road Ahead section of our first Annual Report. In all but three areas, most of which involve multi-year performance improvement initiatives, we are well on track. However, we need to accelerate our progress in the areas of performance measurement, performance against service standards, and the accuracy and reliability of our Human Resources data. Our corporate planning and reporting processes must be supported by rigorous and thorough performance measurement to achieve and sustain continuous improvement. At present, some CCRA business lines are reporting on performance at a higher level than others largely because there are inconsistencies in the types of performance information that is currently being used. Through our Balanced Scorecard, work is well underway that will standardize our approach to performance measurement. When completed and in place across all business lines, a standardized performance measurement system will help the CCRA fulfill its change agenda, strengthen the business reporting process, and improve the rigour and comprehensiveness of performance information in future annual reports. This is therefore a key priority for action in our 2002-2003 Performance Improvement Plan, as explained further on in this chapter.

Through Future Directions, we are taking account of stakeholder expectations and needs. While our first years as an agency were occupied with internal change, client needs are going to drive our efforts for the next several years. Our central vision for this period is compliance through client-centred service. We have exhaustively consulted key client groups—individual taxpayers and benefit recipients, small businesses, large corporations, charitable organizations, traders and travellers—in order to identify the changes and actions that are needed to ensure good performance and continued leadership in responsible and fair tax administration.

Further details of our Future Directions agenda will be elaborated upon in subsequent Corporate Business Plans, starting in spring 2003. Our client-centred approach will be realized through seven strategic directions that emerged during consultations:

Date modified:

2002-11-07