Richard Manicom

Hall of Fame Inductee 1996

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Richard Manicom is guiding the transformation of Revenue Canada into an integrated and technologically advanced organization. He has become an acknowledged leader in helping the entire federal government to lower the national overhead and improve Canadian competitiveness through technology.

Manicom joined the government in 1992, as Assistant Deputy Minister, Information Technology Branch at what was then Revenue Canada-Taxation. That appointment followed a 25-year career with IBM Canada, in which he became the company's most senior technical professional and the first Canadian to be appointed Senior Consulting Systems Engineer. A year after joining the government, Manicom was asked to merge and lead the combined information technology forces arising from the merger of Revenue Canada-Taxation and Revenue Canada-Customs & Excise.

It was a gigantic task. Revenue Canada collects $190 billion a year, about 93 per cent of the government's gross revenue. It is also responsible for border services, trade administration and income redistribution programs such as the Child Tax Benefit and GST Credit. Manicom's combined organization had 2,000 employees, organized into five business lines with separate organizations and cultures, spending $250 million a year.

Under Manicom's leadership, the Information Technology Branch was reorganized into functional groups that traverse business lines. The department embraced the notion of common systems and shared infrastructure. Budget reductions of $40 million were achieved in 30 months without lowering service quality. In 1996, the deputy minister extended Manicom's responsibilities by asking him to set the department's re-engineering strategy for the next four years.

Manicom has been at the centre of most of the integrated department's major accomplishments, including:

• Introduction of The Business Number, an innovative client identification system that is generating savings of $3 million a year from process improvements;
• Implementation of the Accelerated Commercial Release Operations Support System (ACROSS), the first Revenue Canada system designed primarily for electronic commerce;
• Expansion of electronic filing of tax returns to more than 4 million partiC.I.P.A.nts;
• Implementation of several customs initiatives, including: the Line Release System, which reduces border clearance time for trucks to 20 seconds from hours;
• Re-engineering of customs transactions to save hundreds of millions of dollars in coming years for the automotive and aerospace industries;
• The Integrated Customs Enforcement System, which improves the effectiveness of customs inspectors by providing enhanced access to enforcement intelligence information;
• Completion of the Revenue Canada Network project, an integrated telecommunications network that is saving the department $9 million a year.