Payment system mess lost in recent news cycle
The federal government has a big mess on its hands, and no one cares to admit responsibility for it.
The mess is the new Phoenix pay system, designed by Phoenix Payment Systems Inc., based in Wilmington, Delaware.
Ordered by the Harper Conservatives and rolled out by the Trudeau Liberals, it is intended to replace mountains of paper requisitions and payroll records with a sophisticated online system, saving the government an anticipated $50 million a year in the process. The problem is, it doesn’t work. At least, it isn’t working the way it is supposed to for 81,820 of the 300,000 federal public servants who are paid through the new system, which came into operation last February.
Some have been overpaid while others have been underpaid; some have not received their health benefits; others have not received their overtime pay, salary increases or disability or retirement benefits.
A relative few (about 720) have not been paid for weeks or months. Some have had to max out credit cards or resort to high-interest payday loans to meet their mortgage or feed their family.
On two occasions, other screw-ups in the testing of the new system have caused breaches of employees’ private information.
Although the mess has received media attention, notably from CBC Ottawa, it has had only a moderate impact. That’s partly because the news cycle this summer has been dominated by terrorism attacks abroad, gun violence in the United States, and by Donald Trump. And it’s partly because Parliament is in summer recess.
If the Commons were sitting, opposition MPs would be venting their daily outrage at government bungling and demanding the head of Public Services and Procurement Minister Judy Foote, the minister responsible for paying civil servants, and maybe the head of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, too, just for good measure.
It would be good theatre, but who is really responsible?
The Liberals point to the previous Conservative government. The New Democrats blame the Liberals for rushing into the new system without first making sure it worked properly. Judy Foote ducks, sending her deputy minister, Marie Lemay, out to face the television cameras and to serve up explanations to government workers. That’s not good enough. There’s an old doctrine called ministerial responsibility. In the old days, it meant that if something went seriously wrong in a department — a budget leak or a major malfunction or scandal of some sort — the minister could be expected to resign. That seldom happens these days. As government has grown in size and complexity, the doctrine has been diluted.
The best definition of ministerial responsibility today is found in the report of Justice John Gomery’s inquiry into the Chrétien-era sponsorship scandal. Gomery concluded that in modern government it is not realistic to hold ministers personally responsible for errors made by employees in their departments.
But he set out three situations in which ministers could be expected to resign.
They knew or should have known about some major mistake or transgression. Or they failed to put in place measures to prevent such abuses from occurring. Or they failed to take corrective action once the abuses came to their attention.
Does one or more of these conditions apply to Minister Foote?
And here’s a tougher test — her mandate letter from Prime Minister Trudeau when she was sworn into his cabinet. He instructed her to ensure that, “services provided by your portfolio are delivered efficiently, and in a way that makes citizens feel respected and valued. At the same time, I expect that you will ensure that the government’s internal services are held to an equally high standard and that procurement processes reflect modern best practices.”
Does the payroll mess meet the mandate test of efficient service, high standards and modern best practices?
Foote is fortunate that Parliament is not sitting.
If it were, the opposition would be demanding her resignation — and they might well get it.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens, an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail, teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph. His column appears Mondays. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens@sympatico.ca.