I can tell you that based on my many years' experience at Revenue and particularly over the last 20 years, notwithstanding the size of the agency, we have to be extremely thoughtful about where we make investments in terms of, for instance, new information technology systems, risk management, and so on. There is quite a delicate balance to keeping the revenue administration operating properly, so in any given period of time we're targeting investments in certain areas. Reference was made earlier to “targeted investments in the GST”, for instance, in the 1990s, to get that system up and running. Recently, the Revenue Agency implemented a revised corporate tax system. At any point in time, there is focus in certain areas.
I can tell you, just based on the brief time I've been back at the agency, that the attention being focused on the collections file is quite significant. I'd like to point out one thing in particular. Collections used to be part of a section of Revenue under the control of an assistant commissioner who looked after many aspects of the operation. For the last couple of years we have had an assistant commissioner, Mr. Proulx, who has been assigned primary responsibility for the tax collection function. I think that increased senior leadership focused on that, as well as the development under way on what we've referred to as the integrated revenue collections project, which is a critical system development project that is coming into its own, is going to make a big difference.
But we don't dispute that there's more work to do.