Government Operations Committee on Dec. 12th, 2007

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Now that we have representatives of all the parties, I will call the meeting to order. I think we have an NDP member missing, but he will be coming shortly, I would think. We're already a little bit late.

Today a number of witnesses have come before us to address the compensation issue and the challenges some public servants have had. This relates directly to motions passed at the end of the session in June. While we have a number of witnesses, I think three of them are prepared to speak, or is it four or five?

[Monique Boudrias, Executive Vice-President, Canada Public Service Agency]

I'll be very short.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

You'll be very short; then we'll get started.

Could you please introduce yourself and say who you are. We'll go from there.

After that, we will go to questions.

[Monique Boudrias]

Merci beaucoup.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and honourable members. My name is Monique Boudrias. I'm the executive vice-president of the Canada Public Service Agency.

I am pleased to be here today on behalf of the Clerk of the Privy Council to provide you with an update on public service compensation issues.

I bring with me today colleagues from Treasury Board Secretariat, Public Works and Government Services, and the Canada Public Service Agency. Each of the witnesses before you today comes to this appearance with a significant background in human resource issues, including public service compensation issues. They will be giving part of the presentation with me and will follow the order in the document that I have provided to you, Madam Chair, and to the honourable members. Given our work experience and background, we hope to fully address the questions of committee members.

The purpose of the presentation is to provide new information that we believe will respond to the unanswered questions and issues raised by the operations committee during its review of the public service compensation issue last spring. It is also to provide to you an update on efforts under way to implement improvements, including system and capacity-building.

What is the issue? As you will recall, some public servants have indicated that their paycheques are late or are inaccurate. To get a better sense of the issues, we conducted a survey with departments over the summer to look at compensation service delivery problems. The preliminary information we received confirms that many departments are experiencing problems, but that the nature and extent of the problems vary from department to department. We have short-, medium-, and long-term plans to address these issues.

What are the root causes of the compensation challenges? The service delivery challenges are due to infrastructure and workforce issues. In regard to the workforce, we have a capacity issue, and it takes up to 18 to 24 months to train to full maturity, including on-the-job training.

With regard to the infrastructure, the issues are the complexity of collective agreements and the web of rules; the difference in business processes from department to department; and antiquated technology, which causes duplication of data entry by departments, data integrity issues at government level, and uneven levels of service.

The good news is that we have an integrated holistic solution, the public service renewal action plan. The four priorities of the Clerk of the Privy Council for public service renewal include commitments to redress the compensation service delivery situation.

On planning, we are looking at development and support of the compensation community based on business needs.

On recruitment, the plan was to hire a minimum of 100 compensation advisers for 2007-08. Up to now we have hired 109 new compensation advisers: 49 hired to date via a public service capacity-building collective staffing initiative, with marketing still ongoing, and 60 hired by Public Works and Government Services Canada from their departmentally managed recruitment drive.

On employee development, we have enhanced training and capacity, as well as ensured common curriculum across the public service.

In regard to enabling infrastructure, I will now ask my colleague from Treasury Board Secretariat, Dan Danagher, to address the current situation.

Thank you very much.

[Dan Danagher, Executive Director, Labour Relations and Compensation Operations, Treasury Board Secretariat]

Madam Chair and members of the committee, my name is Dan Danagher. I'm the executive director of labour relations and compensation operations at the Treasury Board Secretariat. It is an honour to be here today to discuss this issue and to focus on progress we're making in this arena, particularly on issues that have previously been the subject of this committee's concerns.

I'm pleased to underscore that since this past summer TBS is now monitoring departments' pay administration performance on a regular basis, and it is following progress and improvements where they are most needed. This past summer we surveyed departments in the core public administration. Between this survey and statistics from the pay system, our analysis demonstrated the extent of the challenge. Through dialogue we are having with departments and the sharing of best practices, we have identified, and we are pursuing, workable solutions.

It is important to stress that there has been no suggestion of lateness in the regular biweekly paycheques. The roughly 190,000 employees of the core public administration continue to receive their regular pay in a timely manner. However, the survey did benchmark the existing standard for timeliness for newly hired and departing employees and demonstrated that 66% of organizations were within the standards; a further 11% exceeded that average by in excess of one week; and roughly 23%, on average, were more than two weeks later than standards.

These survey results informed our dialogue with departments, who also provided information on their backlog for the processing of new hires, promotion, acting appointments, overtime payments, and the type of service delivery structure used at the time. All organizations have since adopted action plans to eliminate backlogs, where they existed, and to improve future performance in this area. They are all aware that TBS will conduct future surveys and continue to monitor performance in this area.

In fact, just two weeks ago we launched our second survey of departments, and we expect the analysis to be completed in February 2008. As this survey will be the first to demonstrate the impact of actions taken by departments to tackle the challenges previously raised by this committee, we suggest that the committee be sent a copy of this report at that time. The focus of this work is progress and action, and we are convinced that February's report will show that both have been achieved.

We are fortunately building on a pay administration community of talented, resourceful, and dedicated employees. We have seen strong evidence that departments have taken this matter extremely seriously. They have adopted immediate actions to address the short-term challenges by allocating the resources to clear up backlogs; recruiting new trainees into the communities; hiring coaches and team leaders to quickly increase capacity; increasing the automation of tools and process, where possible, in the short-term; and by restructuring the workload as appropriate.

I am joined by my colleague Diane Lorenzato, the assistant deputy minister of PWGSC's human resources branch, who will provide the committee with the types of actions that are being taken to resolve the issues that have been raised here.

[Diane Lorenzato, Assistant Deputy Minister, Human Resources Branch, Public Works and Government Services Canada]

Madam Chair, distinguished committee members, last April, Public Works and Government Services Minister Michael Fortier updated this committee on how the department was working to improve the delivery of compensation services to its own employees. Eight months later, I am glad to report that we see a greatly improved situation to the benefit of our employees.

While between September and December of last year more than 2,000 of the department's 13,000 employees reported problems with their pay, payments for new and departing employees, as well as payments for overtime, are now completely up to date.

As of last Friday we had no outstanding payments that are older than two months relating to acting appointments or promotions, which is their additional pay for additional duties. The workload of over six months for administrative tasks not related to payments has dropped to about 25 cases from the more than 3,000 cases 14 months ago.

The compensation unit has been restructured to facilitate the career development of existing employees and maximize the transfer of knowledge from our most experienced people to new trainees.

Since the beginning of 2007, we have hired a total of 60 new employees in the National Capital Region and in Matane; of these, there are 10 retirees with extensive compensation experience to share their knowledge with the compensation trainees that we have hired.

Training of 36 employees hired in February and March at the Matane satellite office is continuing under our new training and coaching programs.

A new management system is tracking workload—ensuring that requests are processed and completed within set timeframes, and allowing us to adjust to changes in the volume of requests as needed.

On average, each month the compensation unit of Public Works receives more than 6,000 client service requests, carries out more than 9,000 transactions, and issues 3,000 cheques outside of the regular paycheque.

We have also introduced greater automation. Employees with unused vacation leave were previously issued payments that had to be generated manually. These are now system generated, and we expect also to have an automated system for overtime payments in place in 2008.

We issue regular updates to employees and managers to keep them informed of our progress, and in the months ahead, all employees will be informed of our service-level standards.

Our efforts to strengthen and modernize our compensation services continue unabated. And while we do not wish to appear over-confident, we feel these measures are putting us on track toward having in fact one of the best compensation services in the federal public service.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the floor over to my colleague Gilles Carpentier.

[Gilles Carpentier, Vice-President , Strategic Infrastructure, Organization and Classification Sector, Canada Public Service Agency]

Good day, Madam Chair, honourable members of the committee.

My name is Gilles Carpentier and I am Vice-President of Strategic Infrastructure, Organization and Classification Sector, Canada Public Service Agency. Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today about the three initiatives for which the Canada Public Service Agency is responsible. These initiatives are part of our short and medium-term planning process.

Our first initiative is a complete review of each and every activity in the pay and benefits process with the objective of simplifying and streamlining it. A streamlined and simplified pay and benefits process should result in service improvements and identify opportunities to improve the pay and benefits tool box.

Our second initiative is called pay interface, which may be best summarized as an electronic bridge automatically transferring pay data from existing departmental systems to PWGSC's central pay system, resulting again in simplification of the pay adviser's work.

The third initiative is an electronic pay card, which is meant to eliminate use of the hard-copy pay cards that are still in use in most departments. Again, this more modern working tool should contribute to increased quality of pay and benefits services.

So, in summary, these initiatives are all meant to modernize the pay adviser's tool box and, consequently, increase the quality of pay and benefits services.

Thank you for your attention. I will now turn the floor over to my colleague Renée Jolicoeur from Public Works and Government Services Canada.

[Renée Jolicoeur, Assistant Deputy Minister, Accounting, Banking and Compensation Branch, Public Works and Government Services Canada]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

Thank you.

We will now go to questions.

Mr. Holland, you're first, for seven minutes.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for coming today.

Maybe we could talk, first, about the serious concerns there are about turnover rates within the public service. First, could you tell me how those rates might vary by department, job classification, and geographic location?

[Monique Boudrias]

Madam Chair, I can understand the interest of this committee in movement rates in the Public Service of Canada, and I understand that the president of the Public Service Commission, Mme Barrados, mentioned this subject in an annual report. The agency will be pleased to note any questions you might have on employee movement and will provide you with a response.

However, I'm prepared to talk about movement in the compensation advisory community, which is the topic for today. Certainly we are prepared to talk about that community, but not about the public service at all. That was not how we prepared ourselves. We thought we were responding to questions this committee had at the last hearing, in June.

In terms of employee movement in the public service, obviously it increases the workload for this community. I will talk to you now about the turnover rates for those people.

From May 2006 to June 2007, the retirement rate for the compensation community was 4.0%. The separation from the public service was 1.1%. It means that when we consider the departures for the entire group, we're talking about 5.1%. That is a little bit over the rate of the public service. That is because the compensation community is older than the rest of the public service, as a community.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

You're aware that PSAC submitted an AS round table report to CPSA in August 2006. It recommended that Treasury Board immediately reclassify the compensation advisory positions to the AS-4 level and also establish a national joint council committee to investigate having a new occupational group for compensation advisers. The concern is that, to this date, CPSA has steadfastly refused to meet and address these recommendations.

I'm wondering if you could talk to me about that, why that is, and whether we can expect to see any change in that regard.

[Monique Boudrias]

Certainly, Madam Chair, the Canada Public Service Agency is responsible for the classification standards in the Public Service of Canada. We have an agreement right now with the Public Service Alliance of Canada that the next group to be looked at will be what we call the PA group, that is, the public administration group, which includes the compensation community but also the other administrative services employees who are part of the AS group. We're talking here about thousands of people. We cannot just look at a subgroup of a group when we have so many others who are part of a larger group of employees. So we have an agreement with PSAC that we will be looking at the entire PA group.

I would also like to say that the last time we reviewed the compensation community AS-type jobs, there were some grievances put forward. We looked at the job description, we looked at what the people were doing, and we were satisfied at the public service level that the jobs were well classified.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

You may also be aware that there's a law firm, financed by the compensation community, that has presented a submission to the Human Rights Commission, and this commission recently recommended that the compensation advisers have a case. I don't know if you have any position with respect to that, or if you wish to comment on it.

[Monique Boudrias]

Is that about pay equity?

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Yes.

[Monique Boudrias]

I think, on this, I would like to have my colleagues from the Treasury Board Secretariat answer your question.

[Dan Danagher]

We obviously can't offer any comment about any litigation that might be in progress right now, but I will note the question, and if we have a response with information we can bring to the committee, we will do so through the clerk.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

I appreciate that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Diane Marleau]

You still have three minutes.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Thank you.

In the Auditor General's report in 2000, Sheila Fraser directed Treasury Board to develop a new classification system to avoid further pay equity related cases. Would you not agree with me that the compensation adviser case is a classic example of what the Auditor General was referring to, without referring specifically to that case?

[Dan Danagher]

Madam Chair, I obviously can't make a reference that something is a classic case, because I can't comment on any pay equity litigation.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

Do you share that concern, then? Without talking about the case specifically, do you share that concern of the Auditor General? Do you feel that it's been broadly addressed?

[Dan Danagher]

We feel that pay equity as a whole was broadly addressed in 1999. We are aware that there are outstanding litigations currently in the process that we will address at the appropriate time.

[Mark Holland, Liberal, Ajax—Pickering, ON]

We received a copy of a pay stub for a compensation adviser with CSIS and a copy of a pay stub for a compensation adviser with DND, as well as a work description for both. The difference per annum is $14,000 for the exact same position with the same functions. This clearly indicates that CSIS has been able to rate the complexities of the compensation adviser position and that Treasury Board has failed to. Would you agree with that? And have you looked at these kinds of interdepartmental differences?