(Ottawa) The top official in charge of cleaning up the Phoenix payroll system admits he authorized about 30 federal officials to test mPersona, an artificial intelligence application owned by another senior federal official who failed to declare his conflict of interest. Alex Benay says it was open source software, meaning it was free.
“Yes, absolutely it’s me,” he replied. The Press as part of an information session on the solutions that will be deployed to manage the arrears caused by the Phoenix payroll system.
“The employees did not work on developing the software,” he said. “What they did was develop research, questions to use on the open source mPersona software and then bring those questions back into our master project. So, these employees started developing the beginnings of an artificial intelligence solution that we’re going to implement next month.”
The mPersona software was developed by Symaiotics, a private firm owned by Janak Alford, the chief technology officer of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC). The federal agency’s mandate is to combat money laundering. Alford had failed to fully disclose this duplication, as reported The Press in April.
In total, 34 employees from the Department of Public Services and Procurement (PSPC) were put to work entering data using the software for nearly four months to test its effectiveness. The goal was to determine whether it would speed up payroll processing, according to the department. These employees were given a personal access code during this period, which was abruptly revoked in January as soon as The Press submitted a series of questions to PSPC and FINTRAC.
Was the deputy minister responsible for corporate payroll coordination for PSPC aware of this conflict of interest? “Initially, no,” said Mr. Benay.
PHOTO JUSTIN TANG, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Alex Benay, Deputy Minister for Corporate Payroll Coordination for SPAC
“When we found out that there was an employee who had the software, we did all our research to make sure that there were no contracts, no payroll transactions that were compromised as a result of the discovery,” he added. “And then we were at the end of our discovery period with the software anyway to move on to the next step, so we just closed the research process.”
The ministry had clarified in May that “the source code of the mPersona application is free, available and free for anyone who wishes to use, modify or distribute it” and that its use had “no financial implication” and that “no contract has been awarded”.
The federal government plans to clear a backlog of 112,000 pay transactions by the end of the fiscal year. The Phoenix payroll fiasco has cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion since it was implemented in 2016. The government is currently testing Dayforce software to replace it. It released a first quarterly progress report Tuesday.
With Joël-Denis Bellavance, The Press