‘I CAN’T DEAL WITH THIS’
Phoenix leads to pay problems and sleepless nights for ‘detail-oriented’ fisheries officer
Two years after the Phoenix pay system was rolled out, Canada’s public servants are still being affected by overpayments, underpayments and other errors. In a series of stories, the Citizen tells the stories of those affected by the pay system debacle.
She didn’t lose her house and she never missed a paycheque, but for Johanna Jenkins, Phoenix has been the never-ending itch that can’t be scratched.
Meticulous, detail-oriented and, by her own admission, “a bit highstrung,” the West Coast fisheries officer has endured fouled-up pay and inaccurate T4 slips for nearly two years without relief.
“I’m detail-oriented, but that’s part of my job,” Jenkins said from Nanaimo, B.C. “You have to be. We’re trained to take good notes and do court files. It would drive me absolutely batty to be told I was wrong, but also to be told that they couldn’t tell me why I was wrong.”
Jenkins joined the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 1999 as a fisheries officer, then switched for a few years to the coast guard. In 2016, she transferred back to being a fisheries officer, taking a pay cut in return for a better family life and more chances of promotion. But Phoenix didn’t register the change and she continued to be paid at the higher rate.
“I made sure I reported it. I waited a few months and it didn’t change,” she said. “I went to my manager and said, ‘It doesn’t seem to be getting fixed ...’ and he revealed to me that for a few months he wasn’t getting paid at all. That’s when I thought, ‘Uh oh.’ That was his full-time job for a while, just trying to get paid again.”
Jenkins and her husband, Terje Hanssen, scrimped and saved, knowing they would eventually have to repay the overpayment. But no one at the pay centre could tell them how much she owed or whether they would have to repay the gross amount or just the difference in net pay after deductions. When the pay problem carried over into 2017, Jenkins realized the errors would affect her 2016 taxes.
She created her own spreadsheet of all her paycheques, something she could only do in the office since pay records were only available on DFO’s in-house intranet. Her first T4 was wrong. She complained and was issued a second. It was wrong. A third T4 was also wrong.
“I was puzzled. It seems like pretty basic math. I put it all in a spreadsheet and no matter how I manipulated it, I couldn’t duplicate their numbers.”
Jenkins complained to her manager and all the way up the chain to cabinet ministers. It took the DFO deputy minister’s involvement to straighten out her pay, even though there are still small errors every week.
“These people aren’t supposed to be doing that,” she said. “How is anyone going to get anything done if you’ve got a deputy minister working on everyone’s pay?
“I recognize that I’m not the most severe case. Six or seven months into this and I knew I had colleagues that weren’t getting any money at all. But I escalated. I said, ‘Look, I can’t deal with this.’ I wasn’t sleeping well. I was constantly nervous about what we could spend money on. We weren’t spending anything on luxury items — no movies, no dinners out. We took our daughter out of gymnastics. Anything to make sure we weren’t going to overspend so that when I got hit with the bill, we’d have money to pay for it.”
Her doctor ended up prescribing sedatives to help her sleep.
Jenkins is angry at Phoenix, but makes it clear that she’s not angry at the managers, who’ve been caught up in the Phoenix storm themselves, or the pay centre employees who are trying their best to solve issues that seemingly can’t be solved.
“They are trying. They are completely overwhelmed. I can actually hear the disappointment in their voices when they say ‘Good news! I finally got your pay fixed,’ and when I see the next pay stub and I have to tell them it’s wrong. Is there anything more unsatisfying than a job that you feel like you never get to finish?”
(Pay centre staff) are trying. They are completely overwhelmed. I can actually hear the disappointment in their voices …