Government Operations committee  Yes. The model is different. It used to be that you'd go down the hall to visit your compensation adviser and chat about doing whatever you needed to do, such as going off on leave. That model has shifted to one of self-service and one whereby you put in a request and the pay centre in Miramichi provides you with the service.

Government Operations committee  It was department by department. Every department decided when the layoff notices would go out, so it was not a central decision.

Government Operations committee  Although we went live with that first grouping to keep the rollout tight and we couldn't explore a variety of potential issues, all departments joined us during our testing phase. We had a 15-month testing phase and all 101 departments.... We had a variation of departments that came in to test with us.

Government Operations committee  No.

Government Operations committee  I'll talk about the testing we did on the Phoenix pay system and the 16,000 scenarios. We verified those scenarios, but we didn't apply them directly in July of last year because they had too many defects. There were too many major, critical defects for us to implement the Phoenix system.

Government Operations committee  We did put in place a professional development program, because we had estimated that very few people would actually move to the Miramichi. The training program was lengthy. It went on for two years. The movement of employee accounts to Miramichi was done very deliberately in small pieces to allow the compensation advisers to learn compensation.

Government Operations committee  We encourage people to call the pay centre even if they are going on maternity leave and want to know what documentation they need to fill out. In that case, we take down their information, we send them their forms to fill out—

Government Operations committee  We've always had a form. The one we promoted was recent; it's been for about four weeks now. We had another form on the site but only for pay centre clients, employees who were administered out of the pay centre. We had that form there right from the outset.

Government Operations committee  Or questions. It's not all pay issues—a lot of them are pay questions. They just don't know how to navigate the complexities of the collective agreement and we can point them to the website.

Government Operations committee  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.

Government Operations committee  I don't recall every one, but we do have stop-gap measures in the systems that will not issue payments. Some could be...not $1 million, but some could be legitimate with severance payments going into the tens of thousands of dollars. But we do have stop-gap measures in both Phoenix and in the standard payment system that will stop a large payment from going through.

Government Operations committee  Sorry, I don't recall.

Government Operations committee  It could handle it, but needed a manual intervention versus an automated process. What we're doing in mid-August and then in mid-September is allowing the system to automate that calculation.

Government Operations committee  Our initial intent was to pilot, and then around May of last year, we decided we weren't quite ready to go ahead with the pilot. But what we did was to reconfigure the way we were going to go live. Rather than go live with a mishmash of departments, we took a grouping of 34 departments.

Government Operations committee  Yes. We have a few retroactive automations going in. We have one going in mid-August to allow the retroactivity calculations to be done automatically. Right now they all have to be done manually, so there has to be a compensation adviser who has to manually go in and intervene versus putting in the dates in the past and allowing Phoenix to automatically calculate.