‘A TAD LAUGHABLE’
Public servant meredith phillips, with six-year-old stepdaughter olivia jamer-martin, says dealing with phoenix pay system frustrations resembles the stages of grief.
A week prior to the second anniversary of the Phoenix pay system’s 2016 rollout, a foil balloon in the shape of a “2” hung in the dining room of Meredith Phillips’ Ottawa home.
It wasn’t there as some rueful joke, but rather in celebration of the second birthday of Phillips’ daughter, Agnes, who was born, prematurely, on Feb. 8, 2016.
That Agnes arrived early may have been something of a godsend, as Phillips was already on maternity leave when Phoenix was unleashed — also by premature delivery — on the federal public service.
That timing gave Phillips, then 34, nine months to prepare for the problems heading her way.
An entitlement officer with Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, she and her partner, Adam Martin, had expected there would be some unforeseen pay problems when she returned to work. Since Phoenix was launched, the pay system has struggled to deal with changes for federal employees, including when it comes to such temporary measures as maternity leaves. Accordingly, the couple saved as much as they could throughout Phillips’ leave.
So, when she returned from leave on Nov. 12 and her first subsequent paycheque failed to materialize, she wasn’t particularly concerned. She called the pay centre in Miramichi, N.B., and was told there was a backlog and to simply wait another couple of weeks.
Her husband, meanwhile, had just gone on parental leave from his job with the Department of Finance, and the couple feared that his salary, also paid through Phoenix, might be affected.
“I was quite worried,” Phillips said. “We’d heard all the stories coming out, and it was definitely a conversation we had. I said, ‘Is this a smart move? We need one of our pays to be solid. It’s not like I’m trying to be selfish here — I fully support you in taking parental leave, but …’ ”
Christmas came and went, and still she received no pay. In conversations with her departmental pay adviser, she was told that, as she was receiving no pay at all, her file was a Tier 1 priority. But nothing in anyone’s actions made Phillips feel that way, she says.
In early January 2017, getting nowhere with pay centre employees or those in her own department, Phillips contacted the office of her MP, Liberal cabinet minister Catherine McKenna.
“I asked them, ‘I’m not getting paid. Can you guys get any information? It’s not as much about me getting paid, but can you give me some sort of expectation? I understand that you’re behind, but can you give me a date so I can manage the funds?’ ”
According to Phillips, the pay centre’s reply to McKenna’s request was fairly swift and decisive: Her pay issues, she was assured, would be fixed by Jan. 25.
“So I was good, I was happy.” Her elation was short-lived. “Jan. 25 came around and … I didn’t get paid!” she recalls. “I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ That was a big up and down. If my own MP can’t get an accurate response, then what can I do? “Yeah, Jan. 25 was tough.” Her husband’s three-month parental leave, meanwhile, was coming to an end. It had gone surprisingly well in terms of pay — he’d had difficulty getting his top-up pay, but that was about it as far as the problems went. In early February, he received a call from someone at the pay centre in Miramichi to discuss his Record of Employment.
Phillips recalls standing in awe at this development — that someone at Miramichi had called him, after she had gone to such great efforts for months to speak with anyone there who could help her.
“I thought, ‘ Who is this person?’ It was like a magical unicorn.”
Better yet, her husband asked the magical unicorn for help with Phillips’ case. She hadn’t, by then, been paid in 16 weeks.
The magic worked: Her pay returned to normal by the end of February 2017.
“I did get my pay fixed, but only because this woman had contacted Adam to reconcile his stuff. It was a fluke that I got my pay fixed.
“It was an acute period of terribleness, and then it was gone.”
She described her journey through the pratfalls of Phoenix as not unlike stages of grief.
“At the start I was like, ‘OK, it’ll get fixed. Everything has glitches. It’s just getting implemented. It’ll be OK. This is just training wheels. They’ll figure it out.’
“And then it was like a mild concern. ‘OK, I’ll do all these steps they’re telling me to do, and it will get fixed.’
“And then it didn’t, and at one point I felt really angry about it — frustrated and angry at the same time, because I felt I couldn’t talk to anybody because the people that you call don’t have the information, because they’re just working at a call centre. And the people in my department didn’t know a lot — they would just try to contact the pay centre, but the pay centre’s not contacting me back.
“And then, at one point, I was just so upset. I can only laugh about it now, because my pay did get reconciled.”
She may not be laughing for long, however. She recently moved into an acting Policy Officer position, and Phoenix doesn’t adapt well to change.
“Where I am in my career, I’m in some pools for other departments. I don’t know if I wouldn’t move because of Phoenix, but I definitely would be afraid.
“Now with the acting pay, I hope nothing gets super affected, but I have no idea,” she says. “I’m holding my breath for this week.”
Then, last week, Phillips went online to access her most recent pay stub, and discovered three paycheques. Two of them she eventually reconciled, but the third, with a net-zero balance, indicated an overpayment of $18,000. Colleagues of hers who have had similar experiences assured her that this is “normal.”
Her opening salvo of questions in a phone call to the pay centre didn’t yield her any satisfactory answers, although she said she was asked by the representative there if she’d be willing to take a client-satisfaction survey.
“I wasn’t necessarily sure how to answer,” she wrote in an email. “While the agent was perfectly friendly, I wouldn’t necessarily say I received a ‘service.’ He wrote down what I told him verbatim and then forwarded that to a (compensation) adviser.”
(A spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada, the department responsible for Phoenix, said privacy legislation prevents the department from discussing details of the employment and pay of individual federal government employees.)
It was an acute period of terribleness, and then it was gone.