Caught in payroll purgatory: Local man works for feds for one month, receives one day’s pay

Durrell Bowman worked for the entire month of May. But he only got paid for one day that month.

Bowman, who lives in Waterloo, is a graduate student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at Western University. He’s currently on a co-op placement as a library technician and cataloguer at Parks Canada National Library in Cornwall, Ont. And he is one of many victims of the federal government’s dysfunctional Phoenix payroll system.

The automated system was launched last year. It was supposed to save money, but instead it has made hundreds of thousands of errors. Tens of thousands of federal employees have been paid too much, or too little, or not at all. About $400 million has been spent trying to fix it, but nothing works.

Sometime in April, Bowman says, the system started miscalculating his pay.

“On May 3rd, I received pay for a single day, instead of for

two weeks,” Bowman said. “And on May 17th I started receiving no pay at all.”

The government now owes him $5,300. Of that, $3,800 is for missing pay and $1,500 in taxes that were incorrectly withheld.

Bowman isn’t the only person in his small department affected by Phoenix. A fellow co-op student is in a similar situation.

He tried to get the problem fixed. He contacted his manager, another manager, a staffing advisor, a finance and administration officer, an additional administrative officer, the Phoenix feedback process, and the pay centre, both by phone and by email.

“Everyone claims that the matter is out of their hands and that almost no-one has access to the necessary pay files,” he said.

It gets worse. Bowman had planned to use his salary to pay tuition and fees so he could complete his program by December.

Now he doesn’t have that money, and may have to delay graduation. He had to drop a course he started a month ago, because he couldn’t pay the fee. He has to borrow money to make it to the end of June.

He says he would have been better off if he had lived on welfare, instead.

Bowman got what the government called an “emergency salary advance” to cover pay he should have received in April. But it covers only 60 per cent of the missing pay.

To add insult to injury, some managers working on the Phoenix payroll issues have received performance bonuses. Marie Lemay, the deputy minister in charge of the project, said the managers were in the Department of Public Services and Procurement Canada and the average amount of the bonus was almost $14,200.

The president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the union that represents 90,000 federal workers, said she is “appalled” that bonuses are being paid to managers, when tens of thousands of workers haven’t received the basic pay they are owed.”

“How do you find the wherewithal to cut that cheque, but you can’t get a paycheque paid?” asked Robyn Benson.

That’s an excellent question. Maybe if all 90,000 of those workers went on strike for a week, they’d get some answers. And their plight might be taken more seriously.