Eight years that the Phénix payroll system has been operating on sight, without a measuring instrument. Eight years that thousands of federal public service employees have been vainly stirring up the ashes accumulated over a dark series of overpayments, no pay, unpaid bonuses and years of unused operational experience. recognized, which illustrate the distressing inability of the Canadian public service to get back on the right path once it is bogged down.
Who would have believed it ? More than 3,000 improvements and fixes later, the system implemented by IBM is still ruining lives. A few days ago, The duty reported the ordeal of a Laval civil servant on the verge of retirement from whom the government is demanding more than $12,000 overpaid. Not only was this sum never paid into her bank account, she claims, but this standoff occurs when she herself has lost all hope of getting back the $30,000 in salary that disappeared in the meanderings. of Phoenix between 2016 and 2018.
Last month was Montreal Journal which recounted the setbacks of a civil servant from the Quebec region who had to remortgage his house due to insoluble problems with Phénix. These two stories are not anecdotes, much less anomalies. There are tens of thousands of federal civil servants suffering from similar compensation problems.
United as a common front, the three main unions of federal civil servants estimate that half of their members are still paying the price for errors in their pay system, headaches to boot. Without forgetting the taxpayers, for whom the savings of 70 million promised with Phénix have transformed into unforeseen events of two billion – until now, because the meter is still ticking.
Ruined credit ratings, personal bankruptcies, compromised retirement plans, delayed advancement: we understand the widespread disgust which pushed the common front to demand new financial compensation last week. At the same time, the three unions urge the Trudeau government “to stabilize the payroll system and definitively eliminate the backlog which continues to grow.” This makes sense, even if we doubt that their main solution – swelling the ranks of compensation staff – will really change the situation.
Under the Liberals, the public service has never had so many soldiers. Since 2015, the number of civil servants has increased by 24%. Paradoxically, the government apparatus continues to accumulate delays and dysfunctions. Just think of the surreal passport or visa crisis, which is stretching to the point where our deadlines have become an international laughing stock and a hindrance for our cultural or scientific events.
The swelling has not only slowed down the progress of the state apparatus, it seems to have cut its wings in terms of innovation and the search for solutions. Since 2015, the value of externally outsourced contracts has increased from just under $8 billion to almost $15 billion. This transfer to private consultants, including the omnipresent American firm McKinsey, has grown to such an extent that we are right to worry about its effects on our bureaucracy and on the commitment of the political class.
You don’t have to look back far to see where this disengagement can lead. The Trudeau government has both feet entangled in the ArriveCAN app scandal, which was recently the subject of a devastating report from the Auditor General. Worse, Canada’s procurement ombudsman fears that the “troubling” practice of government suppliers subcontracting work to others, as seen with ArriveCAN, has become commonplace.
The Trudeau government must stop evading. It is up to him to define his political orientations, just as it is up to him to ensure the proper conduct of his programs. There was something truly indecent last Tuesday in hearing the government House leader place the blame on the Harper government, which placed the order for Phénix to the multinational IBM… in 2015!
It was under the Trudeau government that the payroll system was finally launched in 2016. It was again under him that the cascade of problems continued. Pushed into the wire, the President of the Treasury Board said she took “this issue very seriously”. However, she did not want to comment on possible compensation or even on the future of Phénix in the short or medium term.
We welcome his prudence, we would not want to fall into the trap again by precipitating a change of system, of course. Still, eight years of watching Phoenix burn away should have been more than enough time for his government to get its head together. Unlike the mythical bird whose name it bears very poorly, this payroll system will not rise from its ashes alone. The agony has lasted long enough, it is up to the Trudeau government to assume its responsibilities.