Â鶹ӰÊÓ

The federal government is adding temporary staff to handle the backlog in the troubled Phoenix pay system as they reported almost 600 new cases of civil servants who have not been paid.

A new call centre in Toronto has 100 staff and is cutting the wait times for the 80,000 civil servants having trouble with their pay cheques, according to the top civil servant in the department responsible for Phoenix. Three new compensation offices in Winnipeg, Montreal and Shawinigan, Que., are being slowly staffed-up to deal with the backlog affecting more than a quarter of the federal public service. Hundreds of workers haven’t been paid in months, while others are being paid too little or too much.

But 589 new cases have emerged as workers continue to report not being paid, said Marie Lemay, the deputy minister of Public Services and Procurement.

The temporary pay unit is already processing cases, Lemay said, and the Gatineau, Que., office has cleared 1,100 of the 80,000-employee case backlog since last week. Most employees will see adjustments on their next cheque if they didn't see it this week, she added.

Of the 720 employees who had reported not being paid at all, 486 got their full cheques with backpay on Wednesday. Another 139 should get their cheques Aug. 10, with another 35 files still missing the information needed to process the pay. An additional 60 cases are mysteries, and don't appear in the government system at all. Lemay said the government is trying to track down those people to figure out why.

Aside from the workers who haven't been paid in months, 1,100 employees had reported problems with parental leave, severance and other types of leave. Lemay says 74 cases have been processed, but more have been reported. Such cases take about six weeks to resolve, she said.

The three new offices should help resolve all the cases by the end of October, Lemay said, adding that public servants have to report pay problems so they can deal with them. She also urged workers to check their paystubs in advance of their pay date, although employees have to be in the office to be able to access them, which doesn't help those who are on leave or whose jobs take them out of the office, like Coast Guard officials.

No security

While the priority cases are those where workers aren't getting paid at all, those getting their regular pay also face challenges.

One man, a civilian firefighter working for National Defence, said he and his colleagues usually get a lump-sum cheque each spring to cover all the stat holidays for the previous year. They arrange to pay their property taxes as a lump sum rather than paying smaller amounts on a monthly basis.

"If you don't pay by [the end of June], you get hit with a massive interest payment," said the man, who requested anonymity.

"Quite a few of us including myself had to take out a line of credit to pay those, or else put it on our credit card, to pay those taxes," he said.

The man has two children and says his wife just started work this summer. He says his stress level is up because there's no guarantee he'll be paid properly.

"We don't have that security it seems like anymore," said the man, who has been a firefighter for 10 years.

He says his employer owes him $13,000.

"That's a lot of family fun to be had over the summer. You get a little more than half of that once all the taxes and union dues are off, but still that's payment for next year's hockey season for the kids. That's a nice trip out to the coast with the kids and wife for a week. Instead, we're just staring at each other wondering when the money's coming in."

Problems weren't apparent, official says

Setting up the temporary hubs and boosting the number of compensation advisers is eating into the savings expected by switching to Phoenix, Lemay confirmed. The government moved the pay centre to Miramichi, N.B., and cut the number of advisers, hoping for savings of $70 million a year. But the additional call centre and temporary units will cost an estimated $15 to $20 million, with additional costs to come.

The previous Conservative government initiated the change, to which the Liberals remained committed after taking office. The actual rollout started under the Liberals. Many civil servants have criticized the Liberals for moving ahead with the second phase of the rollout after the initial problems appeared.

"It wasn't apparent to us or we wouldn't have. Because we expected some changes," Lemay said.

"There was a fairly low number of complaints that we were getting and we were addressing these, but there was a point that it became very evident that it was outstripping the capacity."

The old system already had an enormous backlog, which Lemay told MPs later on Thursday, was 20,000 cases.

"What took us by surprise was the number of transactions that we had in the system before we did the switch at the last minute," she told reporters at the briefing.

Phoenix is the centre of attention in Ottawa today with the morning briefing and the meeting by MPs on the government operations committee to discuss its ongoing problems.