Public Accounts committee  We're very familiar with it, yes.

Public Accounts committee  Off the top, I would have said all. Everybody I've come in contact with over this period understands that it is a part of our responsibilities, so I have no reason to think that people in the agency aren't aware of it.

Public Accounts committee  I guess I can give you the assurance that I will be working as hard as I can with the agency to get there. We have a minister who has received a mandate from the Prime Minister to provide service to Canadians in a timely manner and improve the quality of the service. Our mandate is to apply the tax system fairly, so to have things like the objections and the appeals function working well is a key part of our mandate.

Public Accounts committee  The governments make decisions about where they provide money. These are all priorities. These are important activities that the agency uncovers. I think we're doing a great job with the money that we received on the offshore tax evasions. We did receive some money in the 2016 budget on the appeals function and we're trying to do the best we can with that.

Public Accounts committee  I think you can be assured because we have a system in CRA now—and I don't know what existed in 2004—where we track all of these recommendations that are given to us, and we hold assistant commissioners like Mireille and others accountable for how they're doing. If we agree to a recommendation, then we will implement it, and we will do our best job.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. We're trying to get back to taxpayers quickly. We're focusing on the low-complexity ones first, because that should be the place where we can make the most progress. What happened in the past was that it would sit on a shelf until an appeals officer was ready for it. Time is not our friend in that case, because the longer it waits, sometimes the harder it is to resolve it quickly.

Public Accounts committee  We will still ask the taxpayer to be efficient.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. Again, what we've had to do here to attack this problem is split it up into pieces: low complexity, medium-high complexity, and group. In the low-complexity category, we're making the case to fix them within 180 days.

Public Accounts committee  I think it's been there for a while, but we've actually beefed it up to the point now where it's catching these things.

Public Accounts committee  The other one didn't work very well. Why didn't it? I don't know for sure. I would ask Mireille if she could add to that, but I can give you the assurance that, with the new one we have, we will be paying attention to the data entries across the organization, verifying them, and improving the data.

Public Accounts committee  Maybe I'll take the two of them quickly. The first thing you raise is that the audit activity is generating additional workload for appeals. I think one of the things that we are trying to do is to help put the things in appeals that should be there, and the things that shouldn't be in appeals not be there.

Public Accounts committee  Yes. I appreciate the question. Being an economist and having spent most of my career at the Department of Finance, there's nobody who loves data more than I do, so thank you for raising that. Indeed, it was a major criticism in the Auditor General's report. It's something that we have a fairly aggressive action plan on to try to turn it around and to try to correct some of the more obvious things that you have raised.

Public Accounts committee  I will probably ask my colleague Mireille Laroche to chip in on that, if she can, because frankly I don't have a great explanation for blank fields. In my seven months I haven't really uncovered that. The one thing I do know is that there were difficulties with the data entry in some cases.

Public Accounts committee  The comment I would make is that we are looking at the service culture in the agency and doing quite a bit of work to see how we can improve, and what we can learn from other jurisdictions and other operations. The one thing I've been focusing on is trying to make sure that this culture applies throughout the organization.

Public Accounts committee  Right. There would always be avoidance activity, but the agency put additional resources into auditing those activities and cracking down, if I could use that term. What that leads to—and this is another one of the lessons we're learning—is that when you do that, either that activity increases or our auditing of that activity increases, you generate work for the appeals branch, because a high percentage of those cases typically would end up getting appealed.