Who We Are

In becoming an agency, our core mission of promoting compliance with Canada's tax, trade, and border legislation and contributing to the social and economic well-being of Canadians did not change. However, we gained flexibilities in how we operate. This allows us to introduce innovations to improve service delivery, realize efficiencies in our internal processes, and pursue more effective partnerships and new business opportunities with the provinces and territories to eliminate duplication.

The CCRA plays a critical role in promoting the social and economic well-being of people across Canada. We are a diverse, complex, $3 billion-plus operation employing almost a quarter of the Public Service of Canada. In 2001-2002, we collected over $300 billion in tax revenue, or about $1.2 billion on average for every working day. These revenues included over $40.1 billion on behalf of the provinces, territories, and First Nations.

We served over 102 million travellers, and processed 10.8 million commercial releases through over 480 customs service locations. We facilitated the interests of thousands of Canadian businesses internationally, and made benefit and credit payments worth over $11 billion to more than 10.4 million Canadians during the year. We processed over 23 million tax returns for individuals and trusts, and another 1.6 million for corporations. We attended to close to 2.5 million businesses that regularly remit GST and HST. Recently, we corrected a long-standing error in the preparation of information on provincial income tax allocation that had resulted in overpaying some provinces about $3.4 billion cumulatively for the 1993-1999 tax years.

We have also pursued an aggressive change agenda that includes Future Directions, an extensive consultations initiative to review our current services, programs and relationships with key client groups: small and medium enterprises, large businesses, individuals and benefits recipients, and charities. We have continued to take a strong leadership role in the implementation of Government On-Line—cementing Canada's first-place ranking in e-government.

We have sought to improve our accountability for the services we provide to other government departments and our provincial and territorial partners. By providing high-quality services at lower costs to these partners, we earn new business, which leads to less duplication of services and improved compliance by business with tax and customs laws.

Over the 2001-2002 reporting year, we continued to strive to provide the best possible service supported by responsible enforcement, within the constraints of our funding envelope. At the same time, we responded in a timely and coherent manner to significant unforeseen challenges in our operating environment.

Date modified:

2002-11-07