Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is an honour to appear before the committee in my capacity as Commissioner of the Canada Revenue Agency. I am accompanied by Mireille Laroche, Assistant Commissioner, Appeals Branch. Ms. Laroche is responsible for the objections program. In my first sev

Public Accounts committee  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 th

Public Accounts committee  That covers part of it. I might express it slightly differently, but yes, there was a time when the agency started to focus more on auditing, certainly in the area of tax-gifting shelters that I had mentioned earlier, where people were engaged in avoidance activities.

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 act

Public Accounts committee  That activity, uncovering those, led to more appeals, and that was a factor—not the only one, but it was a big factor in that growth in the inventory.

Public Accounts committee  I won't be able to respond to every individual case that you raised here, as you can imagine. I get some letters myself from taxpayers giving us feedback. I have to be honest and say that more of them are negative than positive. I guess what I would say is that we are striving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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