The federal government says the increase in the backlog of financial transactions within the problem-plagued Phoenix pay system is due to a big increase in submissions since 2021, but the president of the second-largest federal public service union says “no other company, not even a province, would be able to get away with this—with not paying your employees properly for seven years.”

“It’s a gaslighting situation for a lot of us who are victims and are still victims,” said Jennifer Carr, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada.

According to the government’s dashboard outlining the “backlog of financial transactions waiting to be processed,” as of April 2023, there were 230,000 transactions in the queue that were “not part of normal workload,” compared to March 2021, when there were 94,000.

“It’s a whole combination—there is more coming in than they can process, they’re consistently not meeting their targets, and if they are, it’s just offsetting what’s coming in,” said Carr.

Carr said the employer continues to rely on the unions “to do its work, including making sure people get paid.”

“And I can tell you, as a victim, that’s very frustrating for me,” said Carr, who herself has dealt with overpayment issues, saying she tried as hard as she could to “get them to tell me how much I owed them” and that overpayment letters are coming in to other employees “with no information.”

“Unions are to protect workers’ rights, not to ensure their basic right, which is to get paid for the work that they do,” said Carr. “That’s not our job. But we have been filling that gap where the employer has failed to do that.”

Carr said “an employer has a basic responsibility, and that’s to pay its employees properly, and on time.”

“Unions exist to get you pay increases to make sure you meet inflation, but not the actual, ‘please just pay or pay your employees like you’re supposed to,'” she said.

Some federal employees’ experiences with Phoenix have also led to mental health impacts, said Carr, with the pay system also having an effect on recruitment, retention, and promotions, given problematic employee transfers in and out of departments.

Nearly a quarter of workers say Phoenix has affected their pay, survey finds

The most recent Public Service Employee Survey results were recently released, with 23 per cent of respondents saying that their pay or other compensation had been affected by Phoenix issues in 2022, compared to 29 per cent in 2020.

A total of 61 per cent of those indicating they have been affected said their issues have not been resolved, compared to 63 per cent in 2020.

When asked about ongoing issues with Phoenix, Camille Awada, national president of the Canadian Association of Professional Employees, told The Hill Times that “our job right now is to make sure that our members are protected and getting their pay like they should, but without being consulted by the employer, we’re limited in what we can tell our members and where we can help.”

Awada, who has been in the union’s top job since May 8, added “we are not responsible for getting our members paid, but we’ve been dragged into it because the government so badly mishandled the implementation of the Phoenix pay system; it’s causing our members a lot of heartache, its draining resources from unions, and its costing taxpayers millions of dollars to fix.”

A spokesperson for the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the country’s largest federal public service union, told The Hill Times that they believe the government has hired approximately 375 on-boarded compensation advisers for a job that’s “not easy to learn.”

But they said this hiring campaign should have been happening in years one to six.

“And the stories that come in every single day—not once in a while, but every day—about the hardships and the stress to families and single parents with children—like many Canadians, people who live paycheque to paycheque—you can’t withstand not getting paid two pays in a row,” said the spokesperson.

“There’s no excuses after seven years,” said the spokesperson, describing the way public service workers have been treated as “unconscionable.”

Number of transactions has ‘steadily grown,’ according to PSPC

Although Public Services and Procurement Canada told The Hill Times they were not in a position to speak to the overall results of the employee survey and why results can vary from a department to another, the office said that while progress continues on eliminating outstanding transactions from the early years of the pay system, the number of transactions received at the pay centre in recent years has increased significantly compared to previous years.

According to the department, since 2021, the number of transactions submitted to the pay centre for processing has steadily grown, noting that in 2022, 192,000 more transactions were received than in 2021, representing an increase of 18 per cent—a trend which has continued this year.

From January to May 2023, PSPC said they received 64,000 more transactions compared with the same period last year, an increase that, along with the high complexity of outstanding transactions, has challenged efforts to reduce the overall number of outstanding transactions.

The spokesperson said PSPC are improving their processes and “automating highly repetitive pay transactions,” noting that in 2022, the pay centre processed 138,000 more transactions compared to 2021, a 14 per cent increase.

In the first five months of 2023, the department said they processed 74,000 more transactions than in the same period last year, a 16 per cent increase, and that since November 2020, their “robotic automation has contributed to the processing of over 120,000 transactions.”

The government confirmed that they have also hired several hundred additional pay processors and pay support agents between November 2021 and May 2023, and will also hire 175 additional compensation advisers between June and September 2023—a move it says will increase pay processing capacity by more than 40 per cent compared to 2021.

The PSPC spokesperson also noted that to date in 2023, the government has met service standards 84 per cent of the time on average, compared to 83 per cent in 2022, 80 per cent in 2021, and 72 per cent in 2020.

“We recognize that the implementation of the Phoenix pay system has had an impact, direct or indirect, on employees, which is why claims and compensation processes were put in place for current and former employees for expenses, financial losses and damages caused by the Phoenix pay system,” according to the department. “Eligible employees can also apply for an emergency salary advance or priority payment as a short-term solution while their pay issues are resolved.”

Feds say ‘NextGen’ HR and Pay Project testing conducted to ensure ‘accurate and timely pay’

The federal government’s Next Generation HR and Pay project, meant to eventually replace the Phoenix system, “is to assess the viability of a commercial human resources (HR) and pay solution” in over 33 HR systems now in use across the government, according to Shared Services Canada.

Testing was undertaken with a number of partner departments that were selected as representative of the full complexity of the government’s HR and pay environment, according to Shared Services, including Canadian Heritage, Fisheries, the Canadian Coast Guard, Indigenous Services Canada, and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada.

Shared Services told The Hill Times that testing was conducted to ensure that the solution “can produce accurate and timely pay, taking into consideration the complexity of [government] pay rules.”

Undertaken in a simulated environment, the testing included assessing critical requirements such as official languages, accessibility, security, and privacy.

As of late June 2023, testing of the solution was completed, with work on a final report underway, as well as an assessment of implementation and ongoing operational costs, with an “evidence-based assessment” expected later this year.

mlapointe@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times

 

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