The first thing I would say of a general nature is that the minister has received a pretty clear mandate from the Prime Minister to improve service at the agency, the service that we provide to Canadians.
While there have been occasions in the past where some people have felt the agency was not as sensitive or reasonable, as they could be, I think for the most part I'm very proud of the employees. There is a vast number of people, over 40,000 people who work in the agency, who are really trying to serve Canadians as best they can, but it is true there is room for improvement. That's the first thing that I would say overall. I will come back to the overall point.
As an example of how we're trying to change the focus of what we're doing, when we measured how long it took us to deal with an objection, we started the clock at one point and then we stopped it. Once it went outside the appeals branch, we stopped the clock, because the appeals branch wasn't in control of it at that point, so in some sense there was a logic.
We've turned it, and if you think of it from the taxpayer's perspective, the taxpayer doesn't really care if it's in the appeals branch or somewhere else in government. We'll be running the clock as long as government has control.
If we go back to the taxpayer and need additional information then that's fine. We can stop the clock for that purpose. We're trying, in our services here, to think more about what works for the taxpayer, not just what works for us. It has to be a blend of both.
Going back to your general point, we're trying to do that in all of the areas where we provide services. We've done some great things in terms of the electronic services that we provide. We've got new technologies to help serve Canadians, but there are some places where we just need to improve. We need to think more about how Canadians approach the tax system, and how we communicate with Canadians.
The tax system is a complicated beast, and sometimes we don't do everything we can to communicate effectively and explain it to people who may not understand it as well as we do. We're working on all of those avenues. We're working on improving our correspondence to make it a bit clearer in plain language. I can attest, as a taxpayer, to receiving my notice of assessment, and there have been some recent improvements. That's the kind of thing we're focusing on.
The effort to think about the service from the client's perspective is something that we're doing at the agency. At the end of the day, I should just add the caveat, we have to collect the money that's owed, and sometimes those can be difficult conversations. That doesn't mean we can't have them in a reasonable manner, and we will strive to do that.