Public servants continue to struggle with Phoenix issues as ...

"If I owed somebody money, I'd feel bad about it, but they don't care."

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Published Dec 27, 2024  •  Last updated 3 hours ago  •  6 minute read

Public servants protest over problems with the Phoenix pay system outside the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council in 2017. Photo by Justin Tang /Canadian Press

Randy Biggs is still waiting.

The former public servant, who retired in 2021 after 25 years of service, says the federal government still owes him $43,000 in pay. The delays are thanks to Phoenix.

The federal government first launched the pay system in 2016, and problems soon started piling up as public servants were struggling to get paid fully and on time. Things have gotten better and the government has made progress dealing with a mountain of complaints associated with the plagued system, but many federal public servants faced pay errors last year, according to a new report by Canada’s auditor general.

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The report, released on Dec. 17, found that 32 per cent of employees saw an error in their basic or acting pay during the 2023–24 fiscal year.

That’s up from 30 per cent in 2022–23 and 28 per cent in 2021–22. However, it’s also a significant decrease from the peak of problems in 2019–20, when 51 per cent of employees had to deal with pay errors.

When it came to the percentage of public servants who were still waiting for errors to be fixed at the end of the year, the report found that fewer employees had outstanding issues at that point when compared to previous years. In 2023–24, the percentage of employees waiting for corrections at year end was 14 per cent, down from 21 per cent in 2022-23 and 41 per cent in 2020-21.

At the beginning of 2024, Biggs told the Ottawa Citizen that he was waiting for about $38,000 from his severance package and about $11,400 in holiday pay. Since then, he has received two random cheques with no descriptions, one for $1,500 and $4,300.

“That’s all I’ve gotten,” Biggs said. “I still have not succeeded.”

Jullian Paquin, a spokesperson for Public Services and Procurement Canada, said in an emailed statement that the government welcomes the findings of the auditor general’s report.

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“It should be noted that the AG considers a pay error to be cases where inaccurate data has been entered into the pay system (which can come from all federal organizations), delays in data entry impacting pay and outstanding transactions waiting to be manually processed by Compensation Advisors,” she said. “This year’s report reflects both our continued progress towards improvement of pay outcomes for public servants and the work left to be done. As noted, the main reason why 32% of employees had an error in their basic or acting pay last year is due to unprocessed transaction and not the way the system performed.”

The government has worked to tackle these issues by hiring more than 1,100 compensation agents since September 2022 and using artificial intelligence.

While Phoenix was intended to save the government $70 million by consolidating pay systems across departments, it has since cost more than $3.5 billion. At the same time, the government has spent more than $150 million since 2018 looking into a new platform to replace it.

A February 2024 report with results of initial testing found that Dayforce was a “viable option” for the next HR and pay system, with the government expected to release an estimate of when and how Dayforce could be rolled out by the end of the fiscal year. It’s not expected that a new system will be launched until March 2026.

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The government has said that the current and new systems will likely run in parallel for several years. Until then, the government is looking to standardize its roughly 30 different human resources systems that feed into Phoenix and working to eliminate the backlog of transactions at Shared Services Canada by March 2025 as it’s the first department that will be fed into Dayforce as a trial. Other departments will be slowly integrated.

The Public Service Pay Centre dashboard shows that, as of Nov. 20, there was a backlog of 392,000 transactions waiting to be processed. These include financial transactions – like for employees entering or leaving the public service or getting promotions – and transactions with no financial impact, like changes to personal information.

Of that number, 24 per cent (93,000) of the transactions were within service standard and 24 per cent (95,000) were outside service standard but less than a year old. Fifty-two per cent (204,000) of transactions were over a year old. The government has said that it doesn’t want any backlog older than a year being transferred into a new system.

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While a backlog of 392,000 transactions is significant, it is an improvement from previous months. In October, the backlog stood at 402,000 transactions. In September, that number reached 421,000. Back in 2019, there was a total backlog of 503,000 transactions.

“The number of transactions received at the Pay Centre has steadily increased since 2021,” states the Government of Canada website. “This increase, along with the high complexity of outstanding transactions that remain, have limited our ability to reduce the number of transactions outside service standards. Nonetheless, we are making progress and the number of transactions processed each month has generally increased, a result of our investments in technology and human resources.”

Biggs isn’t optimistic about a new system that will eventually replace Phoenix given it will take hears for the current system to be fixed and amalgamated into the new one.

“I’ve never gotten a reason why it hasn’t been fixed up and resolved,” said Biggs, who has struggled to have his file dealt with.

He said he has called and sent emails “but nobody cares.” He said it feels like there’s no incentive for employees to resolve problems.

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“Every time I hook in with somebody who seems to be assigned the case, they do a little bit of work on it and then all of a sudden when I get back to them, it’s like, oh, they no longer work here anymore.

“If I owed somebody money, I’d feel bad about it, but they don’t care.”

Nathan Prier, president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees (CAPE), which is one of the largest federal public service unions in Canada, said the auditor general data shows that a damages agreement needs to be put in place to “at least cover the hardships employees will continue to face as their employer continues to fail to pay them on time or at all.”

Earlier this year, on the eighth anniversary of Phoenix, three federal unions, including CAPE, called on the federal government to negotiate additional damages for workers who continue to see errors on their paycheques.

In 2019 and 2020, the federal government and several unions reached agreements offering compensation to current and former employees who had suffered financial and non-financial damages due to the pay system, with damages covering the period between 2016 and 2020.

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“We don’t anticipate the case volume to improve much while we embark on a slow transition to a new system,” said Prier, who added that workers have been without a claims process for four years and that the government has refused to begin the process. “While Phoenix is still in place, federal employees should have a guarantee that there will be some standard form of redress available that their union negotiated.”

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