:
Good morning and thank you, Madam Chair.
My colleague Mr. Claude Bourget is accompanying me today.
[English]
Claude is director general, human resources transformation and corporate management, and he works with me. My name is Lysanne Gauvin. I'm the assistant commissioner for the human resources branch of the Canada Revenue Agency.
We're pleased to be here today to provide you with some information regarding the geographic distribution and turnover rate of employees at the Canada Revenue Agency, or the CRA.
[Translation]
The CRA's employees are distributed across Canada. Approximately 80% of CRA's work force resides in our five regions with the remaining at headquarters. Our employees are primarily located in our eight tax centres and 43 tax service offices. Our employee population increases to approximately 43,000 when we are in the tax-filing period.
Small fluctuations in geographical distributions occur as we implement business modernization initiatives and increase our use of new technologies. Due to the cyclical and seasonal nature of the tax-filing season, the CRA makes significant use of term employees ranging from about 5,000 to 10,000 employees at different points in time during a given year.
[English]
Like the broader service, the CRA continues to experience a significant shift to knowledge-based work. Over the last seven years, our relative numbers of processing staff have dropped by approximately 21%, whereas the percentage of auditors, computer specialists, and program officers and such has increased.
The majority of our hiring is done by regional operations, and they are well equipped to hire and train individuals. Last fiscal year, we hired approximately 2,300 indeterminate employees. Many of the term employees we hire are rehired from one year to the next. Hence, we have ongoing access to a knowledgeable and skilled group of employees.
Where it makes good business sense to do so, we draw upon our talented term employees to staff indeterminate positions. More than 50% of indeterminate hirings come from our term employees. As well, we do recruit from other government departments. They represent about 21% of last year's indeterminate hirings. About 17% of last year's indeterminate new hires came from outside the federal government.
In the locations where our tax centres exist, we are often a major employer who plays an important role in the local communities. We do not currently have difficulties in attracting new hires; however, we follow this very closely.
[Translation]
Given the specialized nature of our organization, we are well known as a major employer of auditors and IT specialists. In these areas, we are not currently having difficulty in attracting staff. We are experiencing some challenges, however, in finding and retaining human resources staff, and financial and information services staff in the National Capital Region.
The agency's workforce is diversified. Our workforce reflects the potential availability of employees in all employment equity target areas based on the 2001 labour market availability (LMA) census information. We are waiting for new census data to reveal what demographic changes have occurred since 2001. Where there are specific areas in which we do not need target representation rates, we undertake recruitment processes to find qualified target member candidates.
Because of our geographical distribution, CRA employees have a high degree of second language proficiency and across Canada we provide services in both official languages.
[English]
We have a high retention rate of about 95% of our employees, which means that we have a low attrition rate of about 5%, including retirements. Many of our employees make their careers in the agency, due to the scope of the work we do, the size of our organization, the challenging work we provide, and the personal work-life balance we offer. For example, where operational requirements permit, we offer options such as flexible work hours, the opportunity to work from home, and compressed work schedules.
The CRA will face significant demographic challenges in the coming years. Our knowledge workers are growing older and will increasingly be eligible to retire. Currently, approximately 18% of our workforce is over the age of 55 years. Our projections tell us that this will continue to rise and will reach 21.5% by 2012. Our retirement rate currently stands at 3% and is projected to climb to 3.7% by 2012. Quite naturally, we are tracking these developments closely, and in order to mitigate potential risks, we are taking a number of steps to attract new talent and to recruit more strategically. For example, in our call centres we hire staff who meet the educational requirements of other parts of the organization and have an interest in moving on.
Last fiscal year, we employed approximately 1,200 students. These students are progressively offered more challenging assignments with the goal, where appropriate, of their returning and eventually seeking rewarding careers with the agency. We are also increasing our visibility on campuses, including using students who have worked for the CRA as student ambassadors.
[Translation]
The CRA has always had a reputation of “growing its talent” and nourishing long-term careers. Again, due to the specialized nature of our work, it takes time and considerable effort (6% of salary base and educational assistance) to develop our employees through targeted learning and development assignment opportunities.
We also strive to ensure that knowledge is and will be transferred from our senior and experienced staff to less experienced staff through coaching and mentoring activities. We continue to improve our management development programs to ensure that we have strong leadership to guide us through these challenging times. We also have structured succession planning in place for the executive level. Over the next year, this approach will begin to be implemented across the agency.
[English]
In all of the agency's talent management undertakings—recruiting new staff, developing our employees, putting retention strategies in place—we ensure that the agency's core values of integrity, professionalism, respect, cooperation, and ethics are safeguarded so that Canadians will continue to trust the agency.
Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.
We have also shared with you a deck that we prepared for the committee to give members some demographic information.
I'll turn it back over to you.
:
I'm studious. Sister Frances Margaret never said that in grade school, I'll tell you, which is why I have such big ears--they were pulled all time.
I support the need to come back with something on the passport issue. I'm questioning whether we should open it up to witnesses at this point, because I'm not sure who we would ask. We didn't get a lot of answers from Monsieur Cossette. We certainly got a good promotional package, but it didn't answer our questions.
I feel our researchers should take the next step for us. We should empower them to ask. We're going to bring specific questions from each region that we need to have answered. For example, I asked Mr. Cossette about the decision to cut off Service Ontario as a passport service provider. I've now found out that not one community from North Bay to Kenora on Highway 11 has a passport service, yet we were told we had an unprecedented level of passport service. This is a decision they made two weeks ago that is now having a major impact.
I don't know who to bring forward as witnesses on that, but I would like our researchers to ask Passport Canada what their plan is to address this shortfall. I'm sure other regions have similar questions, depending on their jurisdiction.
If we can have those questions asked and then come back and look at them in a preparatory report, we might then decide if there are witnesses we would like to bring forward. But I'm not sure what putting a number of meetings on this will actually give us.