As we talk about modernizing IT systems throughout government, modernizing payroll, and looking at enterprise-wide initiatives, the issue for me is what went wrong. How do we make sure this never happens again?
Knowing that we have 80,000 backlogged cases.... I hate calling them “cases”, because these are people. These are people who are impacted here. Every time I hear the word “case” I kind of shudder, because I know that for every payroll that we talk about where someone is not getting paid, that's impacting someone's life. That's an individual. That's a person. So we need to make sure we do that.
From my perspective, calling in the Auditor General was as a result of asking what happened here. When the previous government decided to go down this path....
Now, don't get me wrong; it was a 40-year-old system.