Scrap Disastrous Phoenix Pay System, Union Head Urges Ottawa

Scrap Disastrous Phoenix Pay System, Union Head Urges Ottawa
Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, holds a press conference about the Phoenix pay system in Ottawa on Nov. 14, 2017. (The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick)
The Canadian Press
11/15/2017
Updated:
11/15/2017

OTTAWA—Give us a year, and we'll build a working replacement for the trouble-plagued Phoenix pay system, one of the country’s biggest civil service unions told the Trudeau Liberals on Nov. 14.

Tired of months of repeated promises that the system’s shortcomings would be fixed soon, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) wants the government to scrap the system and start over almost from scratch.

“After nearly two years of problems with IBM’s Phoenix pay system, our members have lost confidence in the promise of fixing Phoenix,” union president Debi Daviau said.

“Despite all efforts to fix Phoenix, the number of open cases of pay problems has grown to 330,000 as of October 2017—with no end in sight,” said Daviau. “Enough is enough.”

Daviau said the government’s own IT professionals are more than capable of building a new system to end the pay crisis that has gripped federal employees since Phoenix was launched in April 2016.

It should take roughly a year to build and properly test a new system, based on Oracle Canada’s PeopleSoft human resources management software, Daviau told a news conference, although she could not provide a cost estimate for the project. Oracle is the company that produced the software at the core of the Phoenix system.

Shortly after Phoenix went online, thousands of civil servants began reporting that they had been underpaid, overpaid, or not paid at all—and in many cases, the problems extended over months.

The automated system, designed to streamline government’s antiquated pay system, was supposed to save Ottawa about $70 million a year. Instead, the government has earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to fix it, even as a backlog of problem cases grows larger.

Last weekend, the minister responsible for the pay system said she could not guarantee the ultimate cost of rectifying the problems wouldn’t reach $1 billion.

When asked whether the cost to fix the public service pay system could reach that amount, Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough told CTV’s Question Period “I hope not,” but offered no assurances about the ultimate price tag.

During the summer, the Treasury Board of Canada issued a notice that it was planning to contract Oracle to assess the system in hopes of stabilizing it.

The Senate has already set out to find a replacement system to pay its own employees.

But Daviau said she expected any private-sector solution the Senate comes up with either won’t work or can’t be expanded to handle the often complicated pay files of more than 300,000 civil servants spread over dozens of departments and agencies.

PIPSC, which represents over 50,000 federal government employees, is proposing parallel processes to deal with the immediate pay crisis.

First, the union urged the government to hire more payroll employees to help civil servants who are facing problems navigate the Phoenix maze until a new system is up and running.

In the meantime, IT professionals who are members of PIPSC could be tasked to build an in-house replacement, the union said.

“We already have the expertise and the people within the federal public service capable of designing and building it,” said Daviau. “They just need the opportunity to do so.”

From The Canadian Press