Recent achievements - October 2015
I am pleased to provide you with an update of some of the Tribunal’s recent achievements.
The General Division, Income Security (GD-IS) Section has now completed over 90% of the 7,255 backlog cases that had been transferred from the Office of the Commissioner of Review Tribunals. As a result, the size of our Income Security caseload has become much more manageable which allows us to plan for the implementation of the service standard for all new appeals filed as of December 1st 2015 relating to the Canada Pension Plan and to the Old Age Security Act.
The service standards for the Appeal Division’s Employment Insurance and Income Security and for the General Division Employment Insurance are now in effect since September 1, 2015. The Tribunal is processing all earlier caseloads that are not subject to the service standards in a fair, efficient and timely manner.
A major achievement pertaining to our efforts for transparency consists of the publication of quarterly caseload statistics on our website. As we continue to improve our monitoring and reporting capacity we will be providing additional information.
Furthermore, good progress is being made relating to our commitment to publish all our Appeal Division decisions on our website and we expect to be up to date by the end of March, 2016. The Tribunal will also continue to publish some more decisions from both the Employment Insurance and Income Security Sections of the General Division.
The Tribunal continues to engage with its stakeholders and as a result of their suggestions we are implementing important improvements to the Tribunal’s toll-free information line to ensure that callers now have faster access to better information provided directly by Tribunal staff.
As well, important improvements have been made to the layout of the Tribunal’s website and we are working to gradually increase and improve our web content.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Tribunal is just over two years old, and has faced significant challenges since its creation, we have already made very important progress and achieved significant milestones. This would not have been possible without the hard work of the Vice-Chairpersons, members and staff whose dedication is exemplary.
Finally, I would like to thank parties to the appeals and all stakeholders who have taken the time to provide us with helpful feedback and suggestions as these are invaluable to help us continue to build this new Tribunal.