Why is Phoenix a hassle?

In his early, frolicsome years as prime minister, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives announced an ambitious plan: pay all of Canada’s federal public servants through an automated national system. It would be a stroke of genius. The Tories won praise for finishing on time and saving money. The Liberals launched the Phoenix payment system this winter. There was only one problem: It didn’t work. The Post’s Nick Faris explains.

Q Isn’t the whole point of a payment system to pay people?

A Terrific, a softball to start off: Yes, that is the point, at least in theory.

Q So what’s the problem?

A Around 300,000 public servants work for the federal government. Ever since Phoenix was rolled out in February, many of them haven’t been paid enough. Some have been overpaid. Others haven’t been paid at all. The phrase “Dumpster fire” is overused, but —

Q Wait, only the public service has been affected? Should I really care?

A Well, no matter your thoughts on our country’s bureaucratic travails, Canadian workers have the right to be compensated on time. Public Services and Procurement Minister Judy Foote put it thusly to Postmedia in June: “People shouldn’t have to go without pay.”

Q Fair enough. How many people have been stiffed?

A Thanks to technical glitches, more than 80,000, deputy Public Services and Procurement Minister minister Marie Lemay said last week. The vast majority of those cases are related to “supplementary” pay, including overtime work. But until Wednesday, 720 public servants — new employees and students, mostly — hadn’t seen a single cent since Phoenix went live.

Lemay said 486 of those employees have now received emergency back pay. The other 234 will presumably administer salt to their wounds for the next two weeks.

Q Hmm, maybe that does qualify as a Dumpster fire. But how could the government have let this happen?

A Let me take you back to 2009. Public Services and Procurement unveiled a plan to replace Canada’s archaic regional payment system with a centralized setup, run out of Miramichi, N.B. Under the old system, 2,400 advisers were spread across the country, managing compensation for each individual government department.

The Miramichi centre was to be more efficient: only 550 advisers were hired to direct payment for the public service as a whole. Just think of the savings! The Conservatives did: they expected to save $70 million annually by 2016.

Q It’s 2016. How did that turn out?

A You know it hasn’t gone well, but there’s a bit more backstory. Phoenix is an IBM program; the company started work on the public service’s system in 2011. It was green-lit for use in 34 government departments in February. The remaining 67 were slotted under Phoenix in April.

Q When did things start going wrong?

A Pretty much immediately. The Public Service Alliance of Canada pleaded with the government in April to delay the second phase of the rollout, saying thousands of its members had already been shafted on payments. In late June, PSAC and other unions asked Canada’s Federal Court to legally compel the government to fix the system.

Q Who should I blame for all this, Harper or Justin Trudeau?

A Why choose? According to the NDP, everyone can be a scapegoat. “The Conservatives were wrong to imagine that the federal government could effectively replace its payroll systems with offthe-shelf software from IBM operated by a single pay centre,” Erin Weir, the party’s public works critic, said in a statement on Monday. “The Liberals were wrong to implement Phoenix this year even after employees at Miramichi warned that the system was not ready.”

Q So what is the government doing about it?

A Meeting. Investigating. Hoping that a slew of new satellite offices will lighten the burden on Miramichi’s beleaguered advisers. Public Services and Procurement commissioned a temporary, Gatineau, Que.-based pay centre in June, to be staffed by 115 people; other centres in Winnipeg, Montreal and Shawinigan, Que., will open in August.

The House of Commons’ government operations committee, meanwhile, met for an emergency session Thursday to discuss the saga. Canada’s auditor general, Michael Ferguson, is reviewing how Phoenix was planned and implemented. And Trudeau has tasked Michael Wernick, the Clerk of the Privy Council, with making sure the system is fixed.

Q When will it be fixed?

A October! Hopefully. And it’ll cost between $15 million and $20 million.

Q Well, at least Phoenix didn’t inadvertently expose personal details about every federal public servant in the country, right?

A Actually … it did. CBC reported this month that a defect in Phoenix made personnel records for all 300,000 employees in the system accessible to 70,000 of them. Those records include social insurance numbers.

Senior officials reportedly learned of the flaw in January — a month before the system launched — but didn’t intervene. “It’s another demonstration of how much of a boondoggle this whole Phoenix system really has become now,” PSAC vice-president Chris Aylward told CBC. Q Boondoggle? A More original than “Dumpster fire,” I’ll admit.