Question Period Note: Update on Pay Stabilization: support for employees, and investments

This note focuses on efforts and progress to date to provide support to employees and stabilize the administration of pay, and on financial investments in Phoenix.

Notes:

• All questions related to the mental health of public servants, collective agreements and compensation for Phoenix damages agreements should be directed to the President of the Treasury Board
• All questions related to Next Generation Human Resources and Pay solution are in a separate question period card developed by Shared Services Canada
• Issues related to income tax are under the purview of the Canada Revenue Agency. Questions related to the taxability of damages payments should be directed to Canada Revenue Agency

• The Government of Canada is committed to supporting employees and continues to take action on all fronts to resolve public service pay issues
  • Since the launch of Phoenix, we have implemented a series of measures and made consistent progress towards pay stabilization
  • We have put in place over 3,000 systems enhancements and fixes, which have helped bring increased stability to the pay system and overall pay administration environment

If pressed on the backlog:

• As of April 26, 2023, the backlog of financial transactions beyond the normal workload has decreased by 46% since the peak of January 2018, representing a reduction of 175,000 transactions
• Over the same period of time, the overall queue of transactions waiting to be processed at the Pay Centre has decreased by 35%, representing a reduction of 222,000 transactions
• Progress in reducing the queue of outstanding transactions has slowed as a result of significant increases in transactions received at the Pay Centre
• I would note that significant staffing efforts are underway to build capacity within the Pay Centre
• Since fall 2022, the Pay Centre has onboarded over 570 new hires, 144 of whom joined earlier in May. We are on track to hire an additional 175 resources by end of summer 2023
• We expect ongoing improvements as recent hires become more proficient in pay processing
• We continue to review the future resource needs of the Pay Centre to ensure public servants are paid accurately and on time

If pressed on support to employees:

• Public Services and Procurement Canada has implemented a series of measures focused on stabilizing the administration of pay
• These include providing employees with greater support through our Client Contact Centre, introducing the Pay Pods model, and implementing technical fixes that have improved payroll processing, such as increased automation of transactions
• Improved automation has helped mitigate some of intake's growth. Between 2019 and 2022, net intake increased by 25%, but manual workload only increased by 8%
• Financial support is and will remain available for employees missing any of their pay. This support includes an emergency salary advance or priority payment
• Flexible measures have been put in place to help minimize financial hardships for employees for the repayment of overpayments related to Phoenix pay system issues
• The Client Contact Centre escalates cases of hardship so they can be addressed quickly, and agents are trained to respond to situations where employees may be in distress

If pressed on specific actions:

• We have introduced MyGCPay to all departments and agencies serviced by Phoenix. MyGCPay is a web application that provides employees with a centralized and simplified view of their pay and benefits, to help employees better understand their pay
• We implemented a Retro Redesign Solution that further automates processing of individual late transactions and eligible mass retro payments
• In April 2021 we launched the MyGCPay stub – designed to be more user-friendly and to help employees better understand their pay
• We continue to focus on addressing outstanding transactions while also working towards processing new transactions within service standards 95% of the time. For example, from December 2020 to April 2023, pre-2020 outstanding transactions decreased from 117,000 to 50,000 (57%)
• In addition, we are increasingly meeting service standards. To date in 2023, the Pay Centre has met service standards 84% of the time on average, compared to 83% in 2022, 80% in 2021, and 72% in 2020

N/A

N/A