Goals, Objectives, Strategies, and Results — Continued

Goal 4: Continuous performance improvement and accountability.

With the Ministry's focused mandate, an opportunity exists to strengthen the organization's infrastructure, effectiveness and accountability for its performance.

Objective 1:

Continuously improve and simplify work processes.

Core Business Area:

Executive and Support Services

The Ministry has undertaken numerous efficiency measures, and intends to maintain or improve levels of efficiency in the next three years. This means that the Ministry will remain open to creative/innovative solutions that improve operations and enable it to achieve its business objectives. The implementation of RMP will also play a role in creating efficiencies in business operations, and new measures will be developed as part of that process.

This is another area where RMP will promote new and more cost-effective ways of doing business. This objective focuses on providing the maximum benefit to the public for the work that the Ministry does. Further measures may be developed as RMP becomes operational and provides the means for measuring in new ways.

The Ministry tracks the duration between when physical payments are received and are deposited to the government's account. Shortening the period of time between the receipt and deposit of funds demonstrates an improvement in government cash management. Data for this measure are compiled from various Ministry systems.

The Ministry is committed to reducing transaction costs. To track progress in this area the Ministry collects transaction cost and volume data and reports on the cost per transaction.

The Ministry is also committed to maintaining an efficient system to collect debt. The Ministry will calculate and report on the cost to collect $1 in debt. Included in debt collection costs are staffing and overhead costs (including the cost of information systems).

Strategies:

1. Seek and implement effective business solutions while maintaining efficiency.

2. Increase usage of lower cost electronic processes to maintain projected cost per transaction.

Objective 2:

Develop and implement a risk management plan.

Core Business Area:

Executive and Support Services

This objective supports the Ministry design, development and implementation of a risk management plan consistent with government directions in creating an Enterprise Risk Management plan. Risk management planning is integrated and co-ordinated with other planning processes to ensure maximum identification of the potential risks facing the ministry, the significance of their impact and mitigation strategies.

The Ministry will use a "Risk Maturity Model" as the basis for assessing its progress in developing and implementing a risk management plan.

The model evaluates risk management progress across the following criteria: Organizational Philosophy, Risk Management Leadership and Commitment, Integration with other Management Practices and Systems, Risk Management Capabilities and Reporting and Control. Each of these factors is evaluated by further sub-criteria on a scale of 1 to 5. The model will be used as the basis for a self-assessment questionnaire.

The Ministry is targeting to progress from Level 1 in the Risk Maturity Model in 2004/05 to Level 3 in 2006/07. The definition of these levels is as follows:

Level 1: Organizations are at the Initial stages of risk management planning.

Level 2: Risk management processes are under development and are becoming established and repeatable.

Level 3: Risk management practices, processes and standards are defined and formalized across the ministry.

Strategies:

1. Identify risks to revenue and debt administration and collection and develop mitigation plans.