Government Operations Committee on Nov. 28th, 2017

[Carla Qualtrough, Liberal, Delta, BC]

I'm sorry; I don't have that information.

[Marie Lemay]

A big part of the issue we have is that there was no benchmarking, really, in terms of what the issues were in different departments. The sad thing is that we will not know when we are where we were before. We do know from an OAG report that the system had actually failed on two occasions, I think, earlier. That's what we have.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

What is your definition of failure, though? Surely a system that—

[Marie Lemay]

It had not paid...I think it was 4,000 people, right off. Remember that Phoenix has paid 300,000 public servants every two weeks since it was launched. I'm not trying to diminish the issues at all, but the biweekly pay has been going out every two weeks.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Right, but the failure rate was not having an impact on half of the civil servants, was it?

[Marie Lemay]

I don't believe so, but I don't have any numbers to be able to answer, really.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

You don't know what the failure rate was, per se.

[Marie Lemay]

We don't have that collective view. We did not have that collective view of things, which was a real issue with the system; now we do have it, and we will eventually have a better view of things. We did not have a centralized view of things.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Minister, if we're talking about numbers, and we seem to want them now, what type of metrics do you have regarding the fix of Phoenix? Right now, again, more than half of public servants are being paid incorrectly. Do you expect to reduce that by 50% in a year, or 75% in five months? What type of metrics do we have now?

[Carla Qualtrough, Liberal, Delta, BC]

It's important to clarify that half of public servants have a pay issue outstanding right now, which is slightly different from saying that half of public servants aren't being correctly paid, because every two weeks, people are being paid.

The challenge is that we have to, again, prioritize how we're going to chip away at the backlog while at the same time maintaining the service standard of the 80,000 new transactions coming in every month. We need to make sure that we're addressing those 80,000 transactions. Remember, 300,000 people get paid twice a month, with 80,000 new transactions a month, ranging from people having questions on their union dues to people who got married and are changing their name, to people who didn't get paid, to people who paid less CPP and are wondering why. There are significant financial impacts and some that are not significant, such as a $20 discrepancy versus a $1,000 discrepancy.

What we're looking towards is a continuous improvement, constantly getting at the backlog every month. The more people we have, the more streamlined our processes are, and the fewer glitches we have technologically, the more we can confidently say that we are chipping away at the backlog.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

How does that chipping away look, though? Surely there are targets somewhere, so that weekly, as does a salesperson, you have a target. Are there targets at all?

[Carla Qualtrough, Liberal, Delta, BC]

What we know is that every month the number of transactions we are processing is improving. Last month, we had a service standard of 80,000. I'm going to get this backwards, but 79,000 new transactions came in, and we addressed 71,000 of those, plus an additional 21 manual collective agreement transactions, plus 29 that were automated. We handled 119,000 transactions that month on a service standard of 80,000. At some point, we're not going to have the collective agreements to process, or quite frankly, the next batch of collective agreements will be easier to process because they won't involve two, three, or four years of backlogs. We anticipate, at that point, a steady decline in the number of transactions in the backlog.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Mr. Diotte, I think you're out of time.

Mr. Peterson, you have five minutes.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister, for being here, and thank you to everyone for joining us this afternoon.

I want to follow up a little on what Mr. Diotte was asking. I'm hearing that there are 300,000 employees who are being paid biweekly, for the most part successfully. There are 80,000 transactions coming in a month. Transactions can be anything from a name change, as you mentioned, to a change in address, perhaps, or anything. These aren't necessarily problematic; that's just how many transactions are coming into the system.

How many transactions can be actioned a month under the current HR and other resources that are available?

[Carla Qualtrough, Liberal, Delta, BC]

Thank you.

Les, can you give the numbers?

[Les Linklater]

In terms of the capacity within PSPC, our estimates are that we can comfortably handle about 80,000 new transactions every month. As the minister says, tracking our progress against that, we've been reporting through our public dashboards for the last number of months the number of transactions beyond our service standard, and that number is what we are watching in part as we make progress on queue reduction.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Great. That's netting out to zero, which is obviously proper budgeting, and that's the way it should be. What resources are being used, then, to get rid of the backlog? It seems to me that the resources now are just enough to hold steady.

[Carla Qualtrough, Liberal, Delta, BC]

Go ahead, Les.

[Les Linklater]

What we are doing is calling on the satellite offices, along with a number of external hiring processes. The Clerk of the Privy Council put out a call a number of months ago. We have been recruiting. We've worked with the unions to bring back retired compensation advisers, and we're now actively hiring another 300 compensation advisers. That compensation staff should be onboarded in early January. At that point, we'll have well over 1,500 compensation staff in Miramichi and the satellite offices working on transactions.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Is the number of transactions that can be successfully completed proportional to the number of employees?

[Les Linklater]

We do have certain assumptions around productivity that we've tested with the staff on the ground and with the unions. Obviously, more complex transactions such as terminations take more effort, and others, such as name changes, require less. We do have metrics around time to process and also average productivity per trained staff. We use that to factor into our planning for hiring.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you.

I want to look at the impact that these collective agreements have had. Is there a necessity to maybe budget and plan for exceptional periods of time when there may be more transactions than is the norm? Is there a way to staff up during those periods? Is that accounted for in the new system?

[Les Linklater]

Absolutely, and as we look at better modelling of our workload in the network, we are taking into account a number of issues related to seasonality, such as tax season and summer student hiring. We had assumed that for collective bargaining we could create a dedicated unit of 65 compensation advisers to deal with residual work; that assumption needed to be revisited once we saw the complexity of what we had. That's been augmented to 200.

Going forward, recognizing that Treasury Board continues to negotiate collective agreements, as we look at the service model in Miramichi and the satellite offices, we will build in a component dedicated to collective agreement revision work.

[Kyle Peterson, Liberal, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Okay.

I want to touch briefly on training. For the compensation advisers, what's the onboarding process? How do they come into the role, and what training are they provided when they first come on board?

[Les Linklater]

We take a number of approaches. There are formal courses that are available and classroom training that is available to compensation staff. There's also a lot of an on-the-job component as well. What we have found is that if clerical staff are brought on at lower levels, as opposed to fully trained compensation advisers who are familiar with all 269 subtypes of transactions, they're able to take on some of the more straightforward work and free up the compensation advisers for the more complicated transactions.

We're finding that this is working well. CRA uses this model. They have their own compensation staff. We're now moving within the Miramichi network to pilot a pod approach, whereby we will bring together various levels with various skills in order to be able to focus on specific departments or groups of departments, or certain types of transactions, so that they develop specialization and familiarity with collective agreements.