Government Operations committee  Essentially, departments and agencies have the authority, when regular payroll doesn't run, to issue from their financial group what we call an emergency salary advance or a priority payment. When Phoenix went live, of course we had hundreds, if not thousands, of occurrences each

Government Operations committee  Certainly. Over the summer, we posted a request for information under six streams to allow private sector vendors to bring forward innovative ideas on a number of fronts, such as additional automation at the pay centre, better user experience for employees through the tools that

Government Operations committee  Certainly. We have experienced compensation advisers. We have support staff who are able to help with more straightforward transactions. There is a data analytics capacity to be able to predict and channel the workload to the appropriate staff who have the skills to be able to d

Government Operations committee  Not to my knowledge.

Government Operations committee  Hardship.

Government Operations committee  We have a unit that is dedicated to looking at these types of cases for rapid resolution where there are circumstances of excessive financial hardship. We do have to be careful in terms of our approach. People have a number of pay problems, but we look at severity as a critical f

Government Operations committee  The $25 million in the estimates reflect a couple of dynamics. The first would be accommodation costs for staff, $11 million, and the remainder is a re-profile of funding from the previous fiscal year that was not used. It was assigned to a project that we left behind when we mov

Government Operations committee  First of all, in terms of the pod model, that's an innovation that came from the floor in Miramichi. The staff, along with unions, suggested that we move to the entire employee pay file model, and I'm happy to pass along your words of congratulations. Thank you. In terms of the

Government Operations committee  We do know that the number of outstanding or long-standing pay transactions for departments and agencies not served by the pay centre is considerably lower than that for those that are served by the pay centre. That said, they continue.... Those not served by the pay centre do in

Government Operations committee  The policy hasn't changed, so if there are issues in constituency offices that you're experiencing, I would invite you to provide a list of those individuals to me. We'll look into those cases.

Government Operations committee  I would say that, on average, we're seeing about 80,000 new transactions entering into the system at the pay centre every month. Outside of the pay centre, I would have to verify those numbers.

Government Operations committee  It's not necessarily a difficulty with pay. It could be flagging an HR event such as someone going on leave or taking an acting assignment, but it's something that would have an impact on compensation.

Government Operations committee  I would say that the backlog represents a significant number of outstanding pay issues, and as we're working through that, the complexity comes to light.

Government Operations committee  With any large system on the scale of the pay system, it's not unexpected to see errors arise. When we see issues that result in an outcome that is not foreseen, that would generate what we call an incident report. That is then immediately dealt with to address the issue in the

Government Operations committee  I would say at this point that we have about 1,000 outstanding incident requests that relate to some sort of issue that has come up in the system. In terms of parsing the number of transactions that relate to an error as opposed to a delay in processing, I don't have those figu