Pay fiasco must be fixed
Some people delight in bashing civil servants, especially federal ones, but it would be a cold heart indeed that took joy from the woes of public workers who aren’t getting paid. The federal government’s Phoenix pay system, whose name invites sarcasm, still has not been broken of its habit of paying people too much, too little or not at all. And federal auditor general Michael Ferguson says there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
Ferguson delved into the problems of the erratic pay system since it was launched in early 2016 and found that those problems seem to be getting worse, despite government promises to fix the bugs. By the end of June, unresolved pay errors had reached $520 million in underpayments and overpayments.
That’s a huge number, but the number that matters to ordinary public servants is the one on their pay stubs. Will it be correct? Will it be enough to cover mortgage payments? Workers have endured 18 months of those questions, and they want to know that a cure is on the way.
They have a long wait. Ferguson essentially says the government is dreaming if it thinks the mess can be fixed within the $540 million and three years that have been estimated.
Phoenix is one of those rare, non-partisan disasters. The former Conservative government conceived it and the Liberal government implemented it. Members of both parties should be ashamed of trying to score political points with it.
The Conservatives happily cut 1,200 jobs that they expected would no longer be needed when Phoenix came online. The Liberals have had to hire 1,400 people to apply Band-Aids to keep the beast limping along.
Even that number seems inadequate, because error claims are coming in faster than the pay centre can process them, and it’s getting worse. The backlog of pay problems has hit 520,000. In April 2016, 30 per cent of employees had errors in their pay; in April of this year, it was up to 51 per cent.
About 49,000 people have been waiting more than a year for their pay to be corrected.
Part of the problem is that the federal government took too long to figure out the extent of the issues and too long figure out how to begin solving it.
Ferguson pointed to a similar problem with the health department in Australia’s Queensland state. Queensland Health has spent $1.2 billion Cdn and eight years fixing its payroll system, and it’s not finished yet.
He said Queensland installed a “governance structure” to identify and solve the problem within four months, but Ottawa had no such structure in place 16 months into the crisis. With such a slow start, how can Canada hope to do any better than the Australians did?
The federal government is determined to forge ahead, largely because it thinks it has no choice. It has not taken up an offer from the union representing IT professionals to build a new system.
“There is no fall-back,” Marie Lemay, deputy minister of the Public Services and Procurement Department told the public accounts committee. “There is no former system to go back to.”
Ferguson told the committee that fixing Phoenix should be done in two stages.
“The first priority is to pay people the right amount on time,” Ferguson said. “However, after that is achieved, there will still be work to do to get a system that processes pay efficiently.”
The first priority, which sounds like situation normal in most workplaces, must sound like heaven to the tens of thousands of federal employees who can’t get paid properly.