Thank you for your question.
The information contained in the report refers to the state of affairs on June 30, 2017. The department informed us that the situation was improving, but, as I'm sure you can appreciate, we weren't able to verify whether that was in fact the case.
You mentioned the use of workarounds to solve the problem. To deal with the issue, the department devised an approach whereby employees would enter the information in Excel spreadsheets during those five days. Once the applicable part of the pay system came back online, the information would be uploaded to the system server. This process, however, also caused its share of errors. The situation seems to have improved, but we weren't able to verify that.