Auditor rips public service ‘culture’

OT TAWA • The failed federal public service pay system was the result of a “government culture” that stands in the way of helping people, auditor general Michael Ferguson said Tuesday.

The problem-plagued Phoenix pay system was mismanaged from the very beginning and is just one of the “incomprehensible failures” of the government over the last decade, Ferguson told a news conference after tabling his latest report.

“The building and implementation of Phoenix was an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight,” Ferguson said, adding later that the government has reached a critical moment where it needs to reflect on how to change the way it does business.

The pay system was never properly tested before its launch in February 2016 and Phoenix executives either didn’t understand or ignored warnings of problems, choosing to place potential savings targets ahead of system readiness, said Ferguson’s spring report.

“Phoenix executives were more focused on meeting the project budget and timeline than on what the system needed to do,” the report concluded.

The former Conservative government had projected that Phoenix, conceived in 2009, would save taxpayers about $70 million annually by requiring fewer people to work on pay files. So far, however, it’s estimated that the system could cost $1.2 billion by the time it is stabilized, which could take years.

More than half of the federal government’s 290,000 employees have reported being affected by Phoenix over the last two years. Some have been overpaid, some underpaid and others not paid at all — in some cases for months.

“Overall, we found that there was no oversight of the Phoenix project, which allowed Phoenix executives to implement the system even though they knew it had significant problems.”

It meant the deputy minister in charge of the project didn’t receive independent information showing that Phoenix was not ready, auditors concluded.

In response, treasury board president Scott Brison said his department will ensure independent reviews are conducted on all such projects in future.

The auditor general’s office was also critical of Canada’s military justice system, saying delays have resulted in at least one court martial case being thrown out, with others facing charges never going to trial.

The report also found that the government routinely sells off surplus assets at fire sale prices when goods or equipment could be reused by other federal organizations instead. Based on the government’s own accounting, auditors said assets were sold for less than two thirds of their value with almost no consideration given to repurposing.