“The building and implementation of Phoenix was an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight,” auditor general Michael Ferguson said in his second report on the pay system in six months.
“Phoenix executives were more focused on meeting the project budget and timeline than on what the system needed to do,” the report concluded.
Initially conceived in 2009, the former Conservative government had projected Phoenix would save taxpayers about $70 million annually by requiring fewer people to work on pay files.
How a system with such glaring shortcomings could be fully launched without raising alarms at the highest levels came down to who was minding the store, said the report.
“Overall, we found that there was no oversight of the Phoenix project, which allowed Phoenix executives to implement the system even though they knew it had significant problems.”
The report recommended that an oversight mechanism be put in place before any new IT projects are launched.
In its response, the Treasury Board Secretariat said it will ensure independent reviews are conducted on all such government-wide projects in future, and that the deputy ministers and senior executives responsible for them are made aware of the findings.
Auditors found that Public Services and Procurement Canada, which is responsible for the pay system, was aware of significant failings even before the initial system launch in February 2016, but appeared to ignore the warning signs.
Gartner identified several risks and recommended Phoenix be launched in a limited number of departments with less complicated pay needs, and that Phoenix and the old pay system be run in parallel in case anything went wrong.
Some of the errors, such as minor overpayments, have been relatively easy to correct. In other cases, however, government workers have reported months-long pay nightmares and endless headaches—diminished credit ratings and missed tuition payments among them.
While the Trudeau government has apologized repeatedly for the “suffering” felt by public servants under Phoenix and have pledged to compensate “those who have incurred out-of-pocket expenses as a result,” they have also attempted to distance themselves from the debacle, referring to Phoenix as “the Conservative pay system.”
Civil service unions, however, have pointed fingers at the Liberals, insisting the current government is responsible for paying its employees.
The Conservatives have also deflected blame; Opposition Leader Andrew Scheer has argued that, ultimately, it was a Liberal government decision “to press the start button.”
One department, however, was held out as an example of the benefits of reusing assets. Auditors said the Canada Revenue Agency saved more than $4.5 million over three years by adopting reuse practices.
Ferguson also called for a “fundamental rethink” of how the government provides social services to Indigenous Canadians.
The auditor was particularly critical of Indigenous Services Canada for overstating on-reserve high school graduation rates among First Nations students by up to 29 percent.
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