New federal employee pay system on budget despite problems, official says

Federal officials say they're on budget and on track to realize the estimated savings from a new pay system for federal employees, even though the system has been delayed.

An official with Public Service and Procurement Canada, which is overseeing the new Phoenix pay system, says they don't expect to exceed the anticipated $309-million cost.

Brigitte Fortin also says the government is still expecting to save $67.2 million starting this fiscal year as Phoenix replaces a 40-year-old system that doles out pay to hundreds of thousands of public servants.

• New payroll system leaving thousands of public servants in the lurch, says PSAC
• Problems continue to plague public service pay system
• Unpaid public servants told to ask for emergency cheques

The government rolled out Phoenix starting in February, about seven months behind schedule. The system handles pay to more than 300,000 federal government employees across 101 departments and agencies.

Public sector unions have called on the department to slow down the process to address issues where employees haven't been paid on time, and workers at the employee pay call centre are besieged by questions and complaints.

Fortin says many of the problems peppering the new pay system have to do with people failing to correctly input pay information in a timely way.

Fortin says about 335 employees weren't paid their overtime because their hours weren't transferred from the old system to the new system.

About 2,600 workers were paid too much in overtime as a result of human error, she says. All of that will be corrected in the next pay period, Fortin says.

She says almost three-fifths of the complaints filed since February have been dealt with.

"The vast majority of pay transactions were processed without pay issue, but of course we cannot rule out the possibility of other issues, so we are expecting to see call volume increase again and we will likely field additional complaints," Fortin said.