$540 million-plus to fix Phoenix
Federal pay system ‘fiasco,’ says auditor general — who adds CRA not much better
OTTAWA — The federal government’s chronic salary struggles will take more time and more dollars than the three years and $540 million projected to fix the snafustricken Phoenix public service pay system, the auditor general warned Tuesday — an escalating “fiasco” that the governing Liberals laid squarely at the feet of their Conservative predecessors.
Auditor Michael Ferguson went so far as to warn that the government may be “in a similar situation” to Australia, where a comparable problem has already cost more than $1.2 billion over the past eight years and still isn’t completely fixed.
Ferguson’s review detailed just how many and how often public servants are either being overpaid or underpaid, how badly federal officials gauged the size and the scope of the problem, and how the government under-reported the number of outstanding pay problems even as issues grew.
In all, there were 150,000 employees with pay problems that needed correcting at the start of summer, and a value of over $520 million worth of mistakes. The IBM-designed Phoenix system was supposed to save $70 million a year by modernizing, consolidating and centralizing pay processing.
The Liberals will provide a full and detailed cost estimate to fix the system, but not until next May, with plans to finalize by next month a preliminary road map of dozens of projects aimed at fixing Phoenix.
Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough said the government would look at all options for the long-term, including whether Phoenix will still run the federal pay system. But she also didn’t mince words when she addressed the genesis of the problem.
“The previous government botched the Phoenix pay system from the start,” she said.
When asked whether scrapping the system would make financial sense, Ferguson wasn’t convinced, noting the pay software alternatives that would be available today aren’t all that different than the one the government bought.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer disputed Qualtrough’s version of events, saying, “It was this Liberal government that decided to rush the launch of it, even over the objections of a third-party analysis that this government asked for.”
The problems with Phoenix stood out among all the issues Ferguson found the government needed to right in his latest batch of audits. Among the audit findings:
Callers to the Canada Revenue Agency got the wrong answer to questions 30 per cent of the time, above the 6.5 per cent error rate the agency publicly reports — and that’s only when they were able to actually get through to an employee; only 30 per cent of calls placed by auditors were connected.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada didn’t monitor whether Syrian refugees were being properly integrated into Canadian society, including basic information such as how many children were enrolled in schools.
Health Canada couldn’t say whether its oral health program for First Nations and Inuit children helped in any way.
Cadets at Royal Military College were academically challenged, but the school didn’t ensure they learned proper military conduct, ethics or adequate leadership skills.