Madam Chair, honourable members of the committee, I am delighted to inform you of longer term measures that Public Works and Government Services Canada intends to take to help improve the situation.
I am assistant deputy minister responsible for the Receiver General function, but I'm also responsible for the central pay and pension systems and processes for the federal government.
Presently, compensation advisers in departments enter transactions in 40-year-old legacy systems. And although my organization and our employees work hard to increase the automation to reduce the workload of compensation advisers and improve service to employees, we are limited with what we can do because of the system's old technology.
To address this problem, a few years ago PWGSC started to work on two major projects: pension transformation and pay modernization. Both projects consist of the replacement of IT systems and modernization of services and processes and increased use of the Web by clients. The pension project also includes the transfer of pension services to employees from departments to PWGSC, in fact to Shediac, New Brunswick, which is PWGSC's centre of pension expertise.
The pension project is fairly advanced. Most components will be in production in 2010, as well as the centralization of pension services. The pay modernization project has not started yet. It is being considered among the other priorities of the government. The pay modernization project will increase the automation exponentially. In fact, these two projects will result in employees and managers being able to do transactions on the Web; the majority of pension transactions being processed within a few days, at the most; a large volume of pay transactions to be entered directly by managers in the pay system, reducing the processing time significantly; employees having access to pension experts within seconds; compensation advisers having the time to provide advice to employees rather than spending their time inputting transactions in the system, as they do today.
Thank you for the opportunity to share this information with the committee.