‘Critical’ for DND staff to do mandatory Phoenix training

Thousands of civilian employees at the Defence Department have until next week to complete mandatory training on the controversial Phoenix pay system.

The training is critical to minimize errors affecting the problemplagued federal government system, noted a message sent to all department workers and obtained by the Ottawa Citizen.

Phoenix pay system foul-ups have left thousands of Canada’s public servants unpaid. But senior federal officials have countered that many of the issues with the pay system are not technical, but linked to employees failing to properly fill out workrelated information.

“It is critical that you complete the mandatory training to minimize errors that will lead to pay issues,” the Department of National Defence message pointed out. “Training can help both employees and managers overcome the challenges associated with the transition to the new system.”

The training must be completed by Oct. 7 and involves a one-hour course that can be completed online.

“The majority of employees who have taken the self-paced course have indicated that the training was beneficial to ensuring that their information was entered correctly,” the message said.

Once training is completed, the employee must provide a training co-ordinator with a copy of a certificate of completion. There was no indication what the consequences of failing to complete the course are.

DND employees have been taking the training voluntarily, but as many as 30 per cent of the 24,900 workers have yet to complete the course. “The October 7th deadline reflects the fact that resolving pay issues is a top priority for the department,” DND spokeswoman Jessica Lamirande said in an email response to the Citizen.

Lamirande said the training is offered by the Canada School of the Public Service to all federal employees. “DND chose to make the training mandatory for those who had not yet taken it,” she said.

Several weeks ago, the senior bureaucrat who oversaw the Phoenix project suggested problems could have been avoided if all federal employees were forced to take training on how the system worked.

Rosanna Di Paola, Public Services and Procurement Canada’s associate assistant deputy minister of accounting, banking and compensation, told a labour board hearing that when she looks back at what went wrong she now believes she should have pressed for mandatory training.

“To do it over again, I would have made the argument that training be mandatory for all users,” she testified. “I can’t mandate training, but it’s the one thing, if I could do over, I would do.”

The problems with the Phoenix pay system are at the centre of a labour tribunal hearing into whether the federal government is breaking the law by not paying thousands of public servants properly and on time.

As departments drilled down into the issues, Di Paola said, they found two “root causes” — the information public servants were plugging into the system was wrong or untimely, and the processing times of transactions at the Miramichi, N.B., pay centre were slower than expected.

There are “pieces” of pay administration that are not working, she said, but Phoenix “as a technology is working.”

Di Paola said the 80,000 people backlogged awaiting extra pay are not considered Phoenix problems. They ended up not getting paid what they are owed because information was not put into the system properly.

Her comments, however, have sparked a backlash from federal employees.

Chris Aylward, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said Di Paola was trying to shift blame to the workers.

“We’re talking 80,000 people who didn’t input their information properly?” Aylward asked after her testimony. “I find that hard to believe. And there is no system problem or problem with the pay system? I find that extremely hard to believe.

“It’s embarrassing when we have a manager responsible for the implementation of a new pay system who blames everyone else but the pay system itself ... and (she’s saying) ‘It’s either your HR people or employees themselves who are not inputting data properly’, ” Aylward added.

DND employees who provided the Citizen with the internal message about Phoenix training echoed Aylward’s criticism.

Military managers of the department’s civilian employees do not currently have access to the Phoenix pay system, a situation that has also created problems in the department.

But they are still expected to complete what is called the “Phoenix Self-Service for Military Managers” course, the internal message noted.

Phoenix was designed to integrate payroll and human resources systems.

The government bought off-theshelf software and “reconfigured” and “customized” it to handle the 80,000 pay rules and rates of pay for public servants.