Standing Committee on Public Accounts

Comité permanent des comptes publics

For immediate release

Ottawa, March 22, 2018 -

Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) did not identify and resolve pay problems in a sustainable way to ensure that public service employees consistently receive their correct pay on time. Departments and agencies contributed to the problems; however, PSPC did not provide them with all the information and support to allow them to resolve pay problems, according to a report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts tabled today in the House of Commons by the Hon. Kevin Sorenson, Chair of the Committee.

In the fall of 2017, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (OAG) released a performance audit whose objective was to determine whether PSPC, working with selected departments and agencies, resolved pay problems in a sustainable way to ensure that federal government employees would receive their correct pay on time.

Specifically, the OAG found that a year and a half after the Phoenix pay system was launched, the number of public servants in departments and agencies using the Miramichi Pay Centre who had an outstanding pay request quadrupled to more than 150,000. However, it took PSPC four months to recognize that there were serious pay problems, and it took the Department about a year after that to have a better understanding of the problems, which grew to the point that as of 30 June 2017, unresolved errors in pay totalled over half a billion dollars. In this report, the Committee makes five recommendations (three to PSPC and two to the Treasury Board Secretariat of Canada) that seek to ensure that corrective measures are put in place in a timely fashion and to monitor closely the Phoenix pay system.