Federal employees that were overpaid due to glitched payroll software owe the treasury more than a half billion dollars, say updated figures from the Department of Public Works..The department counted 120,000 current and former employees who received excess payments and have not returned the money to date, according to Blacklock's Reporter..“As of October, approximately 120,000 employees have an outstanding overpayment balance,” said a department briefing note Phoenix Salary Overpayments. “The outstanding salary overpayments stand at approximately $559 million.”.The memo set no deadline for repayment, nor did it estimate of how much money will be unrecoverable due to deaths, resignations, or other factors. “The government has an obligation to recover outstanding overpayments,” wrote staff..“A salary overpayment is an amount of money paid to an employee to which they are not entitled,” said the memo. “Overpayments exist for current and former employees.”.The number of overpaid employees peaked at 372,000 with owed refunds totaling $3.02 billion, it said. “Thousands of current and former federal employees have reimbursed overpayments or made arrangements to do so.”.The tech troubles date from the 2016 launch of the Phoenix Pay System, a failed software program intended to streamline 46 separate payroll departments on a promise of $70 million in taxpayer savings. The program instead garbled cheques for thousands of federal workers – most were underpaid – and resulted in ongoing IT fixes and compensation that has cost more than $2.8 billion..Auditor General Karen Hogan in a report last October 27 said the Phoenix Pay System continues to garble cheques for a large number of employees. “In our audit work we found 28% of employees we sampled had an error,” Hogan wrote in a report Financial Audits..“We performed detailed testing of a sample of federal employees’ pay transactions,” wrote Auditor Hogan. “We expect the government will return to having pay processes that ensure employees are paid accurately and on time. This expectations remains regardless of whether the government keeps its current pay system for some organizations or implements a new one.”.Computer consultants have been contracted through to 2034 to fix ongoing payroll problems. The public works department in a 2022 briefing note said its main consultant IBM Canada Ltd. has options continuing for more than a decade “on an as-need basis.”.Other consultants assigned to Phoenix Pay System repairs include McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm hired “to streamline processes and standardize work at the Public Service Pay Centre to increase efficiency.” The original McKinsey contract worth $4.9 million in 2020 has since been amended three times, to a total $27.7 million..“It’s pretty sad when the government is spending money on consultants to fix the problems created by consultants,” New Democrat MP Gord Johns (Courtenay-Alberni, BC) earlier told the Commons government operations committee..“Allowing highly paid consultants to repeatedly change the cost of their work ever upward is not only fiscally irresponsible but it’s an insult to Canadian taxpayers who work hard and play by the rules,” added Johns.
