Government Operations Committee on July 28th, 2016

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

So there's no reason for someone not to have any money or any pay at all and be forced to find another source of income. There shouldn't be any cases like that. That is my understanding.

[Marie Lemay]

Absolutely.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Weir, we're down to three minutes for you, sir, and then after that, we'll go back to taking questions.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Thank you.

I think I would have to respectfully disagree with the notion that implementing phase two of Phoenix was the correct decision, especially given what we know now, that Phoenix has resulted in about a third of federal employees not being paid correctly.

Now Mr. Liddy made the argument that the risks of not implementing phase two outweighed the risks of implementing it.

Just to make that a bit concrete, are you saying that if phase two of Phoenix had not been implemented, more than a third of federal employees would not have been paid correctly?

[Gavin Liddy]

Possibly, and possibly not paid at all, if we were running two systems.

Again, we're talking about a third of the public servants that aren't being paid correctly. You're absolutely right. However, it's a delay in the payment that they're expected to receive. They are receiving their base pay. What they're not receiving is their acting pay or their transfer from one government department to another. These were problems we experienced before Phoenix was implemented as well, with weeks and weeks of delay.

The system was designed to fix those weeks of delays, and I'm confident that we'll get there once we've cleared the backlog.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

Surely you're not suggesting that the problems with the federal government's payrolls before Phoenix were worse than what we're seeing now.

[Gavin Liddy]

The delays in paying people acting pay, transferring from other government departments, and extra duty pays were certainly in the weeks and weeks of delay.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

What proportion of federal employees would that have been under the previous system?

[Gavin Liddy]

I don't have those figures.

I have figures for a number of departments, not by number of employee, but by the number of weeks delay. They're up to 24 weeks, depending on the category. These are 2009 figures, when the case was made to go forward with Phoenix.

[Erin Weir, NDP, Regina—Lewvan, SK]

To ask a similar kind of question a different way, how much worse would things need to be for you to concede that it was a mistake to rush ahead with the implementation of Phoenix?

[Marie Lemay]

Can I just make sure that I didn't misspeak?

I believe I said that in my opinion I would have done things differently. There are things that we would have done differently. We're not saying this is a success, by a long shot. We realize there are real issues, there are real people involved, and we're really serious about solving it.

Please don't go away from here thinking that we think this is a great thing and that phase two is all good. That's not the case. What we're saying is that we could have done things differently and we're trying to address them now. We will learn a lot from this—a lot.

We will put in place and make sure that people get paid, and we will make the system better and make it what it's supposed to be. The transition is much more difficult and much longer than we thought. That's what I would like the committee to take away.

[The Chair, Conservative, Tom Lukiwski]

We'll go back to the seven-minute rotation now.

Mr. Gerretsen, I have you on my list as the first speaker on the government side.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair,

Thank you for taking the time to come to speak to us and answer our questions.

My constituency office in Kingston and the Islands has been dealing with this since well before the beginning of April. Because we have a lot of government employees, but perhaps government employees in different departments, we've seen different phases of this.

It's taken me a while to wrap my head around this, and I wouldn't even say that I'm fully there yet. What I can say is that there seems to be very specific issues that are different throughout different departments in the government.

In particular, I'll give you one example. In the military, there are military and non-military personnel. The military personnel are fine. The non-military personnel need to use Phoenix to go into if they're doing shift work and log their hours. Their superior, who is a military personnel, then has to go into Phoenix and approve that. The problem is that the military personnel don't have PRI numbers, so they can't get into Phoenix. That's one problem.

There is another problem. We've talked a lot about underpayment, people who are owed money. How about people who have been overpaid? It seems simple enough because you have a device to take that money back, but what about their pension payments? Usually pension payments are just one direction. Their pension is based on what they're making, and if we've overpaid them and put more into their pension, how do we take that money back?

I'm not asking you to drill down into the details of answering these questions, but I want assurance that you understand and have a knowledge of all of these individual problems so that you can move forward.

Then the next question is what resources do you need, if any, to help improve and make it happen quicker than the timelines you've indicated in your chart here?

[Marie Lemay]

We are aware, definitely, of the military issue.

Maybe you want to speak to that quickly.

[Rosanna Di Paola]

You have that perfectly right: they don't have a PRI, so they can't go into Phoenix. We're going to fix that, so we have an October enhancement release with Phoenix to allow military in DND and officers in the RCMP the ability to approve transactions for their non-military, non-officer employees. That's a fix that will be coming in October.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Okay.

[Marie Lemay]

In answer to your question, then, we are aware of many issues, which we are addressing. That's why it's so important that employees reach out to us, if they are having a problem. I can't guarantee you today that we are aware of 100% of the issues. If we don't know about one.... That's why it's so important. We think we know just about all of them, because we've been hearing a lot, we're logging them, we're processing them, and we're dealing with when to address them. But it is important that employees reach out and tell us. For one thing, it's so that we can solve their problem quickly; for another, if it's an issue we haven't encountered, we need to know, because we need to be able to fix it.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

Do you have the resources you need to get to delivering on this, or do you need more resources?

[Marie Lemay]

Right now, with the centres and everything, we feel that we have the resources. But I can tell you that our minister has told us that she wants this fixed and that it's for us to come up with the solutions. We're not being held back as to resources to put this to bed.

Right now, the thing we'll be monitoring the most closely is our pay centre in Miramichi, and when we reach, I'll say, the steady state—when people are fully used to the system, when some of the automation comes in, when that flow is steady—that's when... If we see that it's not, the temporary units that we have are there to stay, and if we can get more compensation advisers, we have said that we would take as many as we can.

I know that the unions have put something on their website calling out to compensation advisers to reach out to us. That's been very helpful, and I hope we get more. If we get more, we'll bring them into the satellite units, and you'll see that timeline go down.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I have about two minutes left, and my last question might take some time to explain.

To me and I think to many people out there, in particular those who are affected by this, it seems a long period of time to be asking people to wait for a fix to what is perceived as a simple problem. Can you walk me through what happens from the moment that somebody calls and creates a complaint or does so online?

Why does it take so long to actually get things sorted out so that people start getting paid? Is it just a sheer matter of volume versus the number of people there to deal with the cases? What is making it take so long?

I have an employee in my Parliament Hill office who started working for me on April 18. I signed the contract with her at the beginning of April. She got her first pay yesterday. She was beyond the three months' probationary period before she even got paid once.

Why does it take so long for this stuff to become aligned properly?

[Marie Lemay]

I almost want to ask you who put her in the system, but I'm not going to go there.

[Mark Gerretsen, Liberal, Kingston and the Islands, ON]

I put it into the system, and it was done properly.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Marie Lemay]

In answer to your question, I really hope that as of last week, people who have pay issues are not waiting anymore. What you're referring to is that there was a period when we were assessing the size of the issues and the backlog and everything. That period was for us the time when we realized that it was outstripping our capacity.

We now have processes in place, so that if we have the information, somebody who's not getting paid will not wait more than three days and until the next paycheque, if we know.

If we don't have the information, if there are things missing, we have to go back to the department. The departments are very seized with this, and we will get the information so that it's on the next one.

The situation you described would not happen today. If the person reaches out to us—let's say, after four weeks—then it would be either at the following paycheque or, if we're missing information, after that.