Standing Committee on Public Accounts

Comité permanent des comptes publics

For immediate release

Ottawa, November 19, 2018 -

Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) failed to properly manage the Phoenix project, the new pay system for federal public service’s employees, which caused a huge number of pay problems and enormous additional costs, according to a report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts presented to the House of Commons today by the Hon. Kevin Sorenson, Chair of the Committee.

The Office of the Auditor General of Canada conducted a performance audit, released in the spring of 2018, with the objective of determining whether PSPC effectively and efficiently managed and oversaw the implementation of the new Phoenix pay system. The audit focused on the Department as the lead organization for building and implementing the system and for operating centralized pay operations for 46 departments and agencies in the Public Service Pay Centre in Miramichi, New Brunswick. The audit showed that because of the Department’s poor management, Phoenix was implemented, among other things, without critical pay processing functions, without having been fully tested to see whether it would operate as expected, with significant security weaknesses and without an adequate contingency plan in case the system had serious and systemic problems.

In its report, the Committee made six recommendations, among which: four were directed to PSPC, including three needing PSPC’s actions to be taken in consultation or with the approval of the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada (TBS); one to TBS and; one to the Government of Canada, to ensure that such a management and oversight failure does not reoccur.