I have a couple things.
First of all, I share your sense of worry on behalf of public servants. It does continue to keep me up at night, and it continues to keep my team laser-focused on our efforts both to stabilize the system—and by that I would mean to ensure that the software/hardware policy infrastructure is in place so that we can confidently say people are being paid accurately—and to address the backlog. As I said, we've reduced the backlog by 160,000 transactions. Our current dashboard, which is publicly available, shows 275,000 outstanding transactions with financial impact and another 75,000 with non-financial impact.
I am aware of the media reports, and I will say that those numbers are in line with what both the comptroller general and the Auditor General have reported. As I said to this committee, I am more optimistic than that. I think if you see that we've reduced the queue by 29% in the past year, knowing that we'll be at full pod by May...I mean, I guess we could all do the math. I think it's somewhere around three years, but it's not three to five, and it's not up to 10. If you add on to that the reality that we are in the process of replacing Phoenix with the next generation of pay system, there's no scenario where 10 years from now we will still be working on Phoenix.