Recent achievements - November 2014

We are now well into our second year of operation and I would like to take this opportunity to provide an update on what has been accomplished and our priorities for the coming months.

Although the Social Security Tribunal faced many challenges in its first year, significant progress has been achieved. The leadership team has worked hard to build and staff the organization, support the appointment of members and provide them with specialized training. We also developed and implemented a new case management system, operational processes and procedures and started to process all new Employment Insurance and Income Security appeals in the General and Appeal Divisions as well as a significant number of cases transferred from the four legacy Tribunals.

In this second year of operation we continue to be committed to ensuring that the appeal processes are fair, transparent, and impartial for all parties. We have implemented a significant number of changes and improvements that are helping us in meeting our mandate such as:

• Implementation of a modified process in Income Security appeals to address the volume of cases fairly and as efficiently as possible;
• Improvements to caseload management, monitoring and reporting systems;
• Organizational restructuring for improved service delivery;
• Significant increases in the number of decisions rendered in each division; and
• Started work to determine appropriate performance indicators, service standards and resource requirements.

Moving forward, our efforts will be focused on:

• Dealing with the transferred and new caseloads in all divisions;
• Working on redesigning our website and improving its content and continuing to add decisions in an accessible format;
• Developing an outreach strategy to obtain relevant and useful information from stakeholders to address their concerns and help us improve our services; and
• Improving several of our reporting and monitoring processes in order to better respond to various requests for information from our stakeholders, parliamentarians, the media and general public.

As Chairperson, I remain committed to developing and improving this Tribunal, its systems and operational processes in order to address all cases fairly and as expeditiously as possible. Significant progress has been achieved to date as a result of the hard work of our members and staff, as well as the government’s recognition on the importance of appointing new members to help process cases faster. I am confident that significant progress will be achieved in the coming months.