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Feds still working to fix Phoenix payroll problems
› OTTAWA — It may take until the end of October for the federal government to clear up a backlog of pay problems associated with its new Phoenix payroll system, a government official says.
About 80,000 federal civil servants have reported problems with their pay since the department began rolling out the new payroll system in February.
To work through the pay issues, Marie Lemay, deputy minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada, said the department has divided pay problems into three priority groups. 
The first priority is employees who have not been receiving any pay. This includes new hires and students, as well as employees returning to work from unpaid leaves of absence. In total, Lemay said the group includes about 1,200 employees, although she added that many of them have now started receiving pay. She said the department’s aim is to address pay issues for employees in the first priority group within three working days of learning of a problem.
The second group is made up of employees whose pay was affected by going on leave or by termination of employment. This includes workers experiencing pay problems related to maternity or parental leave payments, long-term disability payments, severance pay or requests for Records of Employment. 
Lemay reported that by late July, there were about 1,100 employees in this group. She said the department is working to address issues for employees in the second group within four to six weeks of being notified of a problem.
The third group, which is the largest, consists of employees receiving regular pay, but missing supplementary payments, such as extra duty pay and pay related to promotions or salary increases. Lemay said there are about 79,000 federal workers in the group.
She added that by the end of October, the department plans to address all cases in the third priority group that were backlogged with its pay centre in Miramichi, N.B., before June. Lemay said the department has hired more pay staff and opened temporary pay units in Gatineau, Montreal, Shawinigan and Winnipeg. It has also set up a national call centre in Toronto.
She said the department is also offering help to employees facing financial hardship because of missing or inaccurate pay. 
“We have encouraged managers to take advantage of the existing processes through which they can issue emergency payments to employees,” said Lemay. 
“The Treasury Board Secretariat is exploring options to reimburse employees for out-of-pocket expenses they have incurred as a result of inaccurate or missing pay,” she added. “This could include penalties for missed payments and insufficient fund charges.” 
In addition, she said the department is developing more tools and improving training for employees and managers who work with the Phoenix payroll system. 
“While we offered training to employees and met with representatives of all departments every week before the rollout, it is clear that we underestimated the amount of time needed for users to be trained and to feel comfortable with the new system, which has added additional stress to the employees at the pay centre,” said Lemay.
Lemay also told the committee that the department is making enhancements to the Phoenix software to further automate processes and speed up pay transactions and timelines. 
In addition to the pay problems, Lemay said there have been privacy breaches related to Phoenix. One situation happened between March and July 2015, when employee names, identification numbers and pay amounts were inadvertently sent to IBM during testing of the new payroll system.

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