Taxpayer and Business Assistance

Our Day-to-Day Activities

Our Taxpayer and Business Assistance area helps taxpayers, businesses, and registrants meet their obligations under Canada’s self-assessment system by providing access to timely and accurate information. It also provides rulings and interpretations to clarify and interpret tax laws, as well as for CPP/EI purposes, and administers federal tax legislation governing registered plans and charities.

Our goal

In 2009-2010, our goal was to build on our position as an innovative service leader and increase compliance in all areas of tax regulation.

Our outcome

In 2009-2010, we improved the quality of our services to taxpayers by making them more timely, accessible, and easier to use. We maintained our high caller accessibility levels on all of our enquiries lines. Compliance efforts within the tobacco industry were enhanced by developing and testing a prototype tobacco excise stamp. We also implemented initiatives for retroactive refunds and collecting increased charges under the Softwood Lumber Agreement, 2006.

Our challenge

Our challenge is to continue the transformation of all service channels, allowing us to meet client needs in order to encourage voluntary compliance. We must continue to improve our diverse service offerings to address legislative change and increase our responsiveness to the evolving information needs of taxpayers. One means of ensuring that we continue these improvements is to capitalize on emerging technologies.

Spending Profile

Our 2009-2010 priorities

In support of the overarching objectives for the period, we committed to undertake a number of initiatives that focused on strengthening service and tax integrity.

Strengthening service

To strengthen service delivery and make compliance easier, we focused on increasing accessibility to our programs and services and their efficiency.

Our Smartlinks service aligns telephone and Internet service by allowing users of our Web site tax information to link to our telephone service. We added Smartlinks to transactional pages of My Business Account to encourage and support taxpayers who use Smartlinks. A survey conducted of users of Smartlinks by our telephone agents is another tool that has allowed us to make improvements to the Web site to better meet their needs.

Our Community Volunteer Income Tax Program showed an increase in volunteers and the number of returns they prepared for taxpayers who are eligible to use this service. In an effort to maximize the use of technology, we launched an online training program through the CRA Web site for the community volunteers.

We conducted numerous outreach activities for both individuals and businesses and noted that the number of participants increased substantially from the previous year.

Based on results from the national quality assurance program, we enhanced our online portal and Taxpayer Services Agent Desktop application to ensure that all relevant material (such as information on the harmonized sales tax for residents of Ontario and British Columbia and the Home Renovation Tax Credit) was posted to the Web site and to agents’ online reference materials. Enhancements to the Taxpayer Services intranet site and the internal search engine enabled agents to provide better service.

Based on the Profile of Enquiries results and taxpayer feedback obtained by our call centre agents, we have identified highly complex enquiry topics better suited to the subject matter experts located in Centres of Expertise. We redirected such calls to these agents to improve the quality (as demonstrated by the accuracy survey results for these topics) and efficiency of our service.

We provided information sessions on the transition to the harmonized sales tax in Ontario and British Columbia. In support of this transition, our business enquiries agents supported our promotion call-out campaign to provide rural small business owners with information about the pending implementation of the harmonized sales tax.

Tax integrity

As a major step to prevent contraband tobacco products from entering the Canadian market, and to support the Government of Canada’s health objectives, a prototype tobacco excise stamp was developed and is being tested by the tobacco industry. On March 29, 2010, Bill C-9 was tabled in Parliament; it includes proposed legislative amendments to the Excise Act, 2001, to support the implementation of the stamp, expected in 2010-2011. The Bill received royal assent in July 2010.

In support of the implementation of the Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006, we followed through on our commitment to work with exporters to promote continuing compliance and audited the books and records of registered exporters of softwood lumber products.

The CRA has also implemented initiatives for both retroactive refunds and collecting increased charges. These initiatives result from activities under the Softwood Lumber Agreement, 2006 and the Softwood Lumber Products Export Charge Act, 2006 known as the Surge and Third Country Adjustment mechanisms.

Expected results

Our expected results are the criteria we use to measure our activities and report to Canadians on their effectiveness. We carry out our Taxpayer and Business Assistance activities to achieve two expected results.

The telephone is still a popular way for taxpayers to seek information from the CRA. How quickly we respond to those enquiries is a key measure of our performance. In 2009-2010, we met our service standards for answering general and business tax enquiries in a timely manner. We also exceeded our service standard for answering charities enquiries.

For the second year in a row, for general and business enquiries, we were successful in realigning our resources and met our increased target for the percentage of callers able to reach us by telephone. We had to make constant adjustments during the year to balance taxpayer expectations with available resources to handle the fluctuation in demand and provide expected program performance. We also exceeded the 90% caller accessibility target for charities enquiries.

To ensure that the information we provide through our enquiries services is accurate, we make sure that agents have access to up-to-date training and online reference materials. We also use quality assurance techniques that provide ongoing, prompt feedback to our individual and business enquiries agents. Results show that our agents are able to provide technically accurate responses to taxpayers’ questions.

We made significant improvements in responding to simple and regular applications for charitable status within the established time frames. Simple applications have exclusively charitable objects and activities. Regular applications are not as straightforward and require further research to determine whether they are charitable. In 2009-2010, the intake of applications remained relatively consistent, however procedural changes were implemented to this workload that improved our response time.

In 2009-2010, in support of Canada’s national security agenda and international obligations to counter terrorism, we provided a checklist for charities to help them identify vulnerabilities to terrorist abuse, and funded a project within the charities sector to raise awareness of the need for safeguards against terrorism.

This year, we noted some improvement in providing technical income tax interpretations and advance income tax rulings. Both results in 2009-2010 improved from the previous year (see Figure 10 ). We still need to improve the turnaround time for advance income tax rulings.

Figure 10 Timely Response to Requests for Advance Income Tax Rulings and Technical Interpretations

Data quality: Good

The increase in turnaround time for issuing advance income tax rulings is largely due to the greater complexity of incoming files, combined with less experienced, newly-hired staff for this specialized workload. To meet the critical deadlines for these files, we have developed a comprehensive approach and are following through with an in-depth study in an effort to improve performance.

We demonstrated to Canadians our commitment to accessible service by meeting the accessibility and service level targets for all of our enquiries lines. Meeting the targets for the majority of indicators confirms our success in the timeliness of these activities. Our quality assurance monitoring programs assure us that accuracy is a key element in providing quality services.

In 2009-2010, we completed slightly fewer tobacco regulatory reviews and audits than targeted because there were fewer tobacco premises to visit. With fewer licensees, the reduced number of audit and regulatory reviews has no effect on the program. The targeted coverage rates of regulatory reviews and audits on the population of tobacco manufacturers were met.

The registration process for registered plans has been streamlined using a risk-based approach to ensure that resources were dedicated to those plans that presented the greatest risk. In 2009-2010, the desk and field audit programs have both undergone a modernization review to ensure they are operating in the most efficient and effective manner. Nevertheless, we managed to increase the number of registered plans audits by 5.9%.

The CRA is responsible for monitoring the operations of registered charities within Canada to make sure they comply with the requirements of the Income Tax Act. Audits are an important element of this process. During 2009-2010, the number of registered charities audits decreased by 15.7% compared with the previous year. This year, we encountered some staffing delays but we expect improvement in 2010-2011 and available resources to meet the performance results achieved in 2008-2009.

Our commitment to detect and address non-compliance was achieved by meeting our targets for registered plan audits, excise regulatory reviews, and excise audits.

Performance Report Card

Date modified:

2010-11-02