Six years after it was first introduced, piecemeal payouts for the failed Phoenix Pay System is costing taxpayers millions of dollars..The Treasury Board detailed ongoing damages paid to former federal employees whose paycheques were garbled by computer software..“25,000 former employees have filed a claim for general damages,” the board wrote in a report to the House of Commons government operations committee. “Twenty-four thousand of these claims have been resolved with the remainder in progress. Total amounts paid to date for these claims are just over $27 million.”.“For other categories of claims, such as out of pocket expenses, financial losses and severe impacts, just over 9,000 of these claims have been submitted with over 8,100 cases resolved,” staff.wrote. “Total amounts paid to date for these claims are $3.8 million.”.The Treasury Board gave no deadline on when compensation claims would be finished..“The claims process is intended to compensate employees who have been harmed by the Phoenix Pay System and will remain in place until there are no more claims to process,” it said..According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the federal government launched the Phoenix Pay System in 2016 with a promise of $70 million a year in taxpayer savings through the streamlining of 46 separate federal payroll departments dating from the 1970s..Instead, the new software garbled payments for some 220,000 current and former federal employees. No investigator to date has calculated the total cost of what the auditor general called an “inexplicable failure,” but in 2019 the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated costs sat at $2.6 billion..“We have been dealing with the Phoenix system for six years,” Bloc Québécois MP Julie Vignola (Beauport-Limoilou, Que.) earlier told the House of Commons government operations committee. “.The number of cases with arrears owing has grown to 141,000.”.MP Vignola said the payouts Canadians are waiting for range from as low as $756 to as high as $40,000. “After six years this makes no sense. I would not wish this on anyone.”.No manager was suspended or fired over the Phoenix Pay System failure. Marie Lemay, the deputy minister of public works who oversaw the program’s launch in 2016, was subsequently promoted to master of the Royal Canadian Mint at $318,000 a year..“Help me understand how you presided over something that could be such an incomprehensible failure,” asked then-New Democrat MP David Christopherson (Hamilton Centre, Ont.): “Clearly it was not a good decision,” replied Deputy Lemay..“I wasn’t there during the planning of the project,” Deputy Lemay testified at 2018 hearings of the House of Commons public accounts committee. “I remember I was not there.”.In a 2018 report, the auditor general said the program was launched even though managers knew it was untested. “My God the Titanic was heading for the iceberg,” Conservative MP Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West) told the public accounts committee at the time. “Anyone would have said, ‘Oh my God.’”.“How will we ever address this stuff when all we hear is, ‘Well, I wasn’t there at the time’?” asked McCauley. “How do we get past this?”.Matthew Horwood is the Parliamentary Bureau Chief of the Western Standard.mhorwood@westernstandard.news.Twitter.com/@Matt_HorwoodWS
