Pay system fiasco hides grim truth
If it weren’t the Christmas season, many National Post readers might relish the prospect of so many bureaucrats being strangled by their own red tape as a result of the Phoenix pay system fiasco.
Government is notoriously bad about looking after the people it is meant to be serving, so there is a delicious irony about public servants for once being the victims — in this case, of what was supposed to be an efficient, automated national system to pay federal civil servants.
Except … there’s nothing funny about the single mother of two, with Christmas presents to buy, who on payday earlier this month found just $89 deposited into her account, as the federal government clawed back an emergency salary advance made because for 16 months Phoenix had underpaid her by $1,000 a month.
PHOENIX DEBACLE LAYS BARE THE INEPTITUDE AT THE HEART OF GOVERNMENT
Seldom does a conversation with a public servant run for five minutes before it turns to Phoenix, a system so faulty that if it administered the weather Canada would have a snow shortage.
A friend recently regaled me with the story of her latest encounter with the system. She went to settle the bill after a trip to the dentist, only to discover Phoenix had cancelled her coverage. The people in the dentist’s office were unfazed — the cancellation of insurance is a new way Phoenix is screwing people over, but it has already become quite common.
The insurance company advised my friend that for help she had to contact Phoenix, the equivalent of descent into the nine circles of bureaucratic hell.
“When you call, you reach a call centre of people who can’t help you — human answering machines. How does that make any sense?” she wailed. “The people you call don’t have any access to your file, they can’t change anything. All they can do is create a ‘ticket’ so that apparently one of the magical little elves will someday look at your file and decide to fix it.”
There’s no secret why no one can help — as public services minister Carla Qualtrough revealed last month, the unresolved pay problems faced by federal civil servants have reached 520,000, with pay corrections taking more than three months on average (the number has since risen to 589,000 according to the government’s own website, suggesting things are getting worse, not better).
My friend is typical in that she has four other complaints pending, including that someone who is not her husband is listed as her beneficiary if she dies, and the issuance of pay stubs that suggest she has paid thousands less in taxes — and has been paid thousands more in net pay — than is the case.
“Can you imagine the problems that will cause at tax time? I will owe the government thousands of dollars in tax on money that I did not earn,” she said.
Something that is causing huge resentment in the ranks is the belief that executives in the public service are getting their problems solved first. When workers with issues call in, my friend said, they are asked whether or not they are an executive.
“What does this mean? It means that senior management don’t have a Phoenix problem and don’t care about fixing the system,” said my friend. For its part, the government says all employees are provided with the same level of service by the call centre. The nature of the pay issue determines how they are prioritized, said Christine Michaud, Qualtrough’s director of communications.
Public servants in 46 government departments that saw their pay systems centralized under Phoenix cast back fondly to the days when they had a pay clerk in their own department who could help sort out any problems within a short space of time.
As auditor general Michael Ferguson made clear last month in a damning report on Phoenix, the decision to centralize the way public servants get paid was made by the previous Conservative government, replacing a 40-year old patchwork of paycheque distributors. Fine in theory. The idea was to save taxpayers $70 million a month by creating a new service centre in Miramichi, N.B., that would employ 450 pay advisers to do the work of the 1,200 then employed (the Liberals point out the Conservatives even booked the savings in the public accounts).
But a theory that might have worked in a streamlined corporate culture ran up against a bureaucracy that has a natural tendency to resist co-operation and consolidation.
The Liberal government introduced Phoenix in February 2016 and immediately ran into problems. While Ferguson made clear there is plenty of blame to go around, he said the Liberals were slow to recognize there were serious problems and even slower to come up with sustainable solutions.
The upshot is that the estimated cost of stabilizing Phoenix has already exceeded $600 million and is set to keep on rising.
CAN YOU IMAGINE THE PROBLEMS THAT WILL CAUSE AT TAX TIME?
For many Canadians, the idea that more than half the paycheques issued by Phoenix are too high or too low is shocking. It shouldn’t be. Government is often not very good at doing things.
The idea that government is working entirely for the benefits of its citizens is a fallacy — politicians and bureaucrats are hard at work trying to improve their own lives and careers, often interests that compete directly with the public good.
But in this instance, spare a thought for those junior public servants struggling to pay for their Christmas presents, their rent and their taxes.
Instead, throw your coal at the politicians (of both parties) and senior bureaucrats who oversold the savings, underestimated the risks and who have spent the past two years pointing fingers at one another.