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.