Finance committee  Yes. No, and in budget 2018 we did seek additional resources to help support us. We will be receiving additional dollars. I can't remember the exact amounts. Sorry. I didn't bring my budget 2018 documents with me, but we will be seeking additional amounts related to Phoenix in the same area of support as well.

Finance committee  I don't have an answer specifically to your question because it's a program that's not run through the agency but through Employment and Social Development Canada. They would probably be better positioned to say how people are being included or disallowed in that system. But coming back to the point of what you said, just because an application initially is disallowed doesn't mean that a taxpayer client doesn't have the right to come back and provide additional information.

Finance committee  There's a couple of things I would want to take from your question. The backlog of compensation cases within the agency right now stands at about 25% of all CRA employees that have been—

Finance committee  We have roughly 40,000. So you could say roughly one-quarter, or 10,000 people. It's a significant number. One of the things in the agency that is much better is that we have our own compensation advisers. We have people that our employees can go to directly to talk about their pay and to get additional information.

Finance committee  Not within our supplementary estimates. No, there isn't.

Finance committee  I don't have 2017-2018 in my stats.

Finance committee  I'm sorry, I don't wave the information with regard to how many forms are being reviewed.

Finance committee  We generally receive 250,000 forms in a given year. Depending on how far back we go where we're looking at reviewing those that have been rejected, it would be hard to say exactly what number that looks like. I haven't seen in any of the material that I've received that exact number of the ones we're reviewing right now.

Finance committee  The rejection rate is quite low. What we've seen in terms of the number of cases allowed versus the disallowed percentage in 2016-2017 is 14% in terms of those rejections. That's of the total number of cases of 266. That would relate to all of the requests coming in. It wouldn't just relate to a very specific groups of people, it would be everyone.

Finance committee  Would I say “sufficient”? I would say we will make a point of making sure that resources are made available. The agency has flexibilities to move from some areas into other areas in order to deal with it, recognizing that it's a one-time-only type of initiative that's going to happen.

Finance committee  The agency does that on a regular basis. It does look at what it's spending its money on and asks if there is an opportunity to really reinvest in higher priorities for government, and reducing things that are lower priorities. Space is one of those things. This initiative didn't really result in any loss of efficiencies, because it didn't result in loss of people.

Finance committee  Maybe what I can do is just speak to the dollars you talked about, if money would be reallocated to that. We don't have any additional resources coming into the agency to help support that. However, as I mentioned, in two exercises just recently we looked at how can we shift resources to deal with high priority areas, and this would be one of those areas.

Finance committee  Over the past couple of years the agency has been looking at its operation. It has a very large footprint from coast to coast with our various tax centre offices, the office buildings where our people work. We found vacancies in some of our buildings. Like every other government department, we pay rent to support those facilities.

Finance committee  Thank you. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee to present the Canada Revenue Agency’s 2017-18 supplementary estimates (C). First, the agency is seeking $11.7 million as a result of a reduction in its accommodations requirement. This was made possible due to a series of cost-saving exercises carried out by the Canada Revenue Agency which has resulted in a reduction in our office space requirements by approximately 36,000 square metres of space, representing a total savings of $11.7 million.