A Message from the Commissioner

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) touches the lives of Canadians from all walks of life through its interactions with individuals, businesses, and charitable organizations. It is our role to administer the tax, benefits, and related activities that support the vast range of social and economic programs that sustain Canada's high standard of living and quality of life. Our goal is to be a World-Class Tax and Benefit Administration.

This past year, the CRA took further steps to make it easier for Canadians to meet their tax obligations by improving the electronic offerings that allow us to more effectively deliver services, increase the overall accessibility of tax information, and provide more options to interact with us. We began to offer a number of new and enhanced secure digital services for both businesses and individuals—including Auto-fill my return, for which we received over seven million requests during the 2017 filing season. We also completed the redesign of 75% of our external correspondence to make it easier to read and understand.

The CRA strives to ensure that all taxpayers comply with Canada's tax laws. Budget 2016 investments have allowed us to enhance our focus on large multinational corporations, increase the number of auditors assigned to detect offshore non-compliance, and collect outstanding tax debts.

The protection of Canada's revenue base is greatly aided by international collaboration. During 2016-2017, the CRA continued to work with other tax administrations to improve transparency and address instances where tax planning arrangements are undertaken by multinational enterprises to inappropriately minimize their taxes. This has allowed Canada to maintain its central role in international discussions on base erosion and profit shifting, and to support multinationals operating in Canada that will be affected by the country-by-country reporting obligations that are to begin in 2018.

The CRA recognizes the importance of maintaining the trust of Canadians, so we make it a priority to be open and transparent. Canadians rely on us to exercise the highest levels of security to protect their information and they expect Agency employees to perform their duties with the utmost integrity. Over the past year, we put in place stronger technological controls and processes to proactively detect fraud and information abuse, and identified security weaknesses before they could be exploited. We also made aggregate data available to other government departments and agencies, academics, and the public in ways that balanced openness, transparency, and appropriate protection of sensitive information.

We recognize that the CRA is an organization that is highly visible and we are very proud of both the excellent reputation we have earned and our accomplishments over the past year. I know, however, that we cannot simply rely on past achievements; we can always do better. For this reason, the CRA has embarked on a world-class tax and benefit administration initiative to inject fresh ideas into the way we operate. Making use of international comparisons, we are examining our initiatives and operations using a rigorous and principled assessment to identify the Agency's strengths and reveal opportunities to position our organization to meet current and future challenges. As the environment in which we operate continues to evolve, we will strive for excellence in the tax and benefits administration that we provide to Canadians.

In submitting this report, I would like to extend a sincere thank you to all CRA employees who, in 2016-2017, helped deliver over $31.8 billion in benefits to Canadians and administered over $498 billion in taxes on behalf of governments across Canada. As we move forward, I remain confident in the dedication, knowledge, and professionalism of our employees to deliver quality results that matter to Canadians.

Original signed

Bob Hamilton
Commissioner of the Canada Revenue Agency