Good morning.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My name is Marie-Claude Juneau, and I'm the director of access to information and privacy, ATIP, at the Canada Revenue Agency. I would like, once again, to thank all of you for inviting us this morning to describe the access to information framework within our agency.
I'd like to start by giving you a bit of background on how the ATIP program operates at the CRA.
The CRA is one of the largest organizations in our government. It has more than 40,000 employees. These employees administer and manage vast amounts of information—including taxpayer information—all of which may become the subject of an access to information request.
The CRA processes one of the largest volumes of ATI requests each year. In 2014-15, it received the fourth largest number of ATIP requests among all federal institutions and processed more than 1.3 million responsive pages—the second largest number among federal institutions.
Like other institutions, the CRA has experienced considerable growth in page volumes over the past 10 years. In 2005-06, the agency reviewed nearly 350,000 pages. In 2014-15, less than 10 years later, this figure has more than tripled, to 1.3 million.
The volume challenge at the CRA is compounded by the high complexity of the requests we receive. They frequently involve records related to tax litigation or require consultation with third parties such as provincial, federal, or international bodies.
Collection of documents, consultations, and the review and severing of thousands of pages, cannot always be completed in the default time frame of 30 calendar days. Over the past five years, 79% of all requests received by the CRA were completed within that 30-day limit or, if an extension was taken, within the extended deadline. The CRA had to apply extensions longer than 60 days to more than 3,000 requests.
To process such requests, ATIP analysts must continuously consider our agency's current legal environment, the interplay between the provisions of the Access to Information Act and the information and confidentiality provisions of the CRA's program legislation—for example, the Income Tax Act and Excise Tax Act—and our information exchange agreements with third parties, so that it can sever files appropriately. In particular, section 241 of the Income Tax Act and section 296 of the Excise Tax Act prohibit the disclosure of client-specific information and take legal precedence over the disclosure provisions of the Access to Information Act. These confidentiality provisions are critical to safeguarding and protecting client-specific information, recognizing that the disclosure of such information could be seriously injurious to an individual or organization.
In response to this environment of increasing complexity and volumes, the CRA has significantly increased its investment in the ATIP function. Our total budget has grown from $6.1 million in 2010-11 to $9.7 million in 2014-15. This represents a 59% increase in funding over the last five years. lt is important to note that these numbers only reflect direct costs within the ATIP program itself. They do not include the significant costs associated with retrieving these records and the time that employees spend providing recommendations to ATIP to support the processing of requests.
The CRA has complemented this investment with expanded efforts to provide access to information through other channels, such as the My Account and My Business Account channels. We also provide Canadians with a great deal of information through our charities website.
The CRA's Open Government Implementation Plan outlines the many ways the CRA is expanding access to information. These include the provision of anonymized data sets through the Open Data portal and the recent introduction of a virtual library on the CRA website, where frequently requested information is posted.
I hope I have provided committee members with a flavour of the complexity and operational challenges that the CRA is addressing in its ATI function.
I would be pleased to answer any questions you may have.
Thank you.