Evidence of meeting #28 for Public Accounts in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A video is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Mr. Stevenson, your time is up. You can ask a very quick question if you want.
Conservative
William Stevenson Conservative Yellowhead, AB
I was just going to ask about the bottleneck in the application process. That needs to be improved the most.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
In my mind, the bottleneck starts, for sure, with the fact that it takes 330 days, on average, to process an application. If you tackle that, you'll improve that, but, eventually, you'll need capacity to train.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you.
Lastly, Mr. McKinnon, you have the floor for five minutes.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Thank you all for being here. Thank you for your diligent work on all these files, all of you.
I'm going to go back to bottlenecks, but I'm going to the pay system again. Progress to simplify and standardize payroll and processes has been limited. Is there any particular impediment to making progress in this area?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I think it's in everyone's best interest to make sure public servants are paid on time and accurately. How the government goes about doing that, to simplify payrolls, is up to them. Right now, it is trying to work with the unions to negotiate and figure that out.
There was one element that was worked on, and they're still working on other simplifications. A memorandum of understanding was signed between Treasury Board and the unions so that this can even be done between collective bargaining. I think everyone's goal is to just try to avoid many pay errors once we move to the new system.
I think it's definitely a great question for Treasury Board. I can't tell you why it's slowed down, but they have made limited change, and, as a result, customization is needed, which comes with an annual cost.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
If I understand, you're not saying that it's a lack of resources on the government side. It's more about negotiations with the unions and....
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I have to admit, I don't know why they haven't made progress. I don't typically talk about what the central agencies and unions discuss. I can just give you the facts that they wanted to simplify payrolls, and there have been very few done. As a result, a mitigation strategy is in place, which is customizing Dayforce to compensate for those.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Is there any particular department that is more problematic than others?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Do you mean in terms of the complexity of payrolls?
Liberal
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Again, I have no clue. I think that would be a question for the Treasury Board Secretariat as to what they have been trying to simplify, but I think they're looking at bigger, broader things, such as how acting pay is handled across the public service. That's not unique to one department. That is something that is bigger and broader across the public service. Finding out what their priorities would be and what they're trying to focus in on first would be a great way to know whether or not there has been a particular department that's slowing this down.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
From what I understand, this is going to be critical in going forward with the Dayforce system. Perhaps you can sketch the timeline of how that system is developing and where it is.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I'm not usually one to guess. What I can tell you is what the government's put out as its timeline. The government had a plan to transition all of the departments by 2034. It shortened that by three years in January of this year, so now the government wants to do it by 2031. The first three departments are expected to transition in 2027.
What we're seeing that is different here, from Phoenix, is that there is a small wave at the beginning and, then, I would expect to see some adjustments made. That's why it's important to have a lot of vigilance around monitoring the existing risks that they know and that we have flagged in this audit, but then also emerging risks, which may come because of reductions, because of the comprehensive expenditure review or because of early retirement. All of those will add to pay transactions and complexity, and they need to be factored into timelines as you move forward.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
I understand the transition is not going to be done in one fell swoop, but it's going to be gradual, a few departments at a time.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
That's definitely different from what we saw back in 2016.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
These changes to payrolls and such could be done as they transition into the new system on a department-by-department basis.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I think it's a little more complex than that because of how the collective agreements work. It isn't as simple as just simplifying a payroll and then fixing it. It will be about when all the collective agreements get renewed and how it gets impacted. Simplification is not simple, unfortunately, with payrolls.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
A lot of this complexity in the payrolls and processes is wrapped up in agreements with unions and so forth.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Well, the complexity is in some of the collective agreements around payrolls, but the complexity of the processes is well within the government's control. Dayforce is also replacing about 30 HR management systems. This is one government, and across 49 departments there are 30 different HR management systems. Standardizing that will help as well.
I think there are really two ways of going about making HR-to-pay simpler. It's not just payrolls. It's also about all the processes within the federal public service.
Liberal
Ron McKinnon Liberal Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC
Since the processes are within the purview of the government and it's not a matter of negotiation, is there any particular bottleneck there that we can talk about?
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
I'm not sure about a bottleneck. I think it was a decision made on timing. The government had identified about 250 HR-to-pay processes they wanted to standardize across the public service. They've made progress on almost 200 of those, but no department is expected to adopt these new standardized processes until they migrate over to Dayforce. Again, that might be something they want to think about with regard to whether there's merit in doing that earlier.
It just shows you how complex it is and how it's really a shared responsibility between departments and agencies as well as the central agencies that manage the actual pay system to make sure that employees are paid accurately and on time.
Auditor General of Canada, Office of the Auditor General
Well, we're on the right path right now, but there are still many public servants who have been underpaid or overpaid and need corrections to their pay. Clearing up that backlog, especially the older ones, is critical.