Ottawa paid $11M in OT to fix federal pay fiasco

OTTAWA • The federal government has paid out $11.3 million in overtime over the past three years to public servants tasked with taming the monster that is the Phoenix pay system, according to a new document tabled in the House of Commons.

The figure is yet another example of the escalating costs associated with fixing the payroll problems that have plagued a majority of Canada’s federal public servants over the past few years.

A report published this summer by the comptroller general found the boondoggle had cost upwards of $1.1 billion and was expected to cost an extra $500 million every year until problems are fixed.

Average expenditures of between $2.8-$3 million annually on overtime for pay centre employees in Miramichi, N.B. were detailed in a document tabled Monday responding to a written question by Conservative MP Kelly McCauley. The figures go back to December 2015 and average out to about $13,600 in extra pay for each of the centre’s current 830 employees, although staffing levels were much lower three years ago. About 1,500 staff in total are now working on payroll issues across the government.

The extra hours are spent resolving tens of thousands of over- and underpayment cases for employees across the country and even at Canadian offices abroad.

As of the end of October, there were still 303,000 transactions with financial impact to employees waiting to be resolved, over and above the 80,000 transactions that Public Services and Procurement Canada considers to be a “normal workload.”

According to the department, the backlog had gone down by 8,000 cases since mid-September and by 81,000 since January. There was also a pile of 91,500 inquiries or transactions with no financial impact.

“Our government remains focused on stabilizing the Phoenix pay system and resolving these unacceptable issues, which continue to be our number 1 priority,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during question period earlier this month.

“We did not create this Phoenix problem, but we are going to fix it.”

It was the Conservative government that in 2009 decided to replace the government’s old pay system, and began the process of centralizing payroll managers in Miramichi instead of housing them within individual departments. But it was the Liberal government that went ahead with an initial rollout of the new Phoenix system in February 2016.

Despite early problems it proceeded with an even wider implementation two months later.

Bureaucrats estimated the new system could run more smoothly than the old one, and save about $70 million in annual operating costs. Instead it’s costing more than twice as much, with glitches that have caused employees to go without pay for months.