Question Period Note: Processing of Pay Transactions

This note focuses on the efforts and progress to stabilize the administration of pay, manage intake of pay transactions, and the ongoing reduction of the backlog.

• Canada’s public servants deserve to be paid accurately and on time
• The Public Service has grown in recent years. This, combined with increased human resources activity and employee movement, has resulted in significant increases in intake at the Pay Centre starting in 2021 and throughout 2022 and 2023
• The Government of Canada remains committed to resolving pay issues for public servants, reducing the number of outstanding transactions and continuing to implement numerous measures to improve pay delivery and support pay stabilization

If pressed on the increase of the backlog:

• Progress in reducing the backlog of outstanding transactions has slowed as a result of significant increases in transactions received at the Pay Centre
• We are working hard to manage new transactions within service standards to minimize and prevent the creation of new backlog cases
• Many outstanding transactions are complex and require processing by experienced staff
• We are ensuring that the most complex cases are assigned to our most experienced staff, and we are fast-tracking hiring efforts to fill vacancies
• Significant staffing efforts to build capacity at the Pay Centre have been successful. Since September 2022, the Pay Centre has onboarded approximately 1,100 new compensation employees to support Pay Operations, while also expanding the skillsets of its existing workforce. We expect ongoing improvements as recent hires become more proficient in pay processing
• Although managing intake continues to be the top case-processing priority, the Pay Centre initiated a renewed, focused effort towards backlog elimination, beginning in Fall 2023
• We remain committed to processing the most critical outstanding transactions first, prioritized by transaction age and impact on the employee

Queue and backlog

Since January 2018, Public Services and Procurement Canada’s Pay Centre has made significant progress in reducing the overall queue and backlog of pay transactions, Despite productivity improvements, high intake levels have outpaced pay processing capacity, leading to increases in the queue as well as in the backlog of cases that are a year old or more.

Intake and workload at the Pay Centre has grown. Intake for the 2023 calendar year was almost 1.44 million cases, surpassing the intake for 2019 (1 million) by 44%, 2020’s intake (865,000) by 66%, 2021’s intake (1.04 million) by 38%, and 2022’s intake (1.24 million) by 16%.

Public Services and Procurement Canada continues to make progress on older cases, but that progress has slowed as intake, and therefore the overall volume of work, has grown. These outstanding transactions, both intake and backlog, are not errors – they represent the normal pay administration work we do to support our client population.

The number of transactions processed each month varies based on a number of factors, such as the complexity of cases and collective agreement implementation. Intake also shows seasonal trends, with peaks at the end of the calendar year, the end of the fiscal year, and the end of summer, which marks the completion of many casual and student work terms.

In 2023, the Pay Centre processed 247,000 more transactions compared to 2022. However, the increase in output was met by an increase in intake of 203,000 transactions, offsetting the impact of the increase in productivity. The growth in intake is driven by the increase in the population of departments served by the Pay Centre as well as changes in per capita intake trends. Per capita intake is now higher than it was in 2019, having fully rebounded from the dip that began in March 2020.

In addition, new challenges have been affecting progress to eliminate outstanding transactions and keep up with new intake since March 2021. These challenges include the high complexity of transactions that remain in the backlog, changing employee and enterprise behaviour such as increased HR activity and employee movement, as well as government-wide operational and human resources policy priorities which have contributed to workload increases. Examples include classification conversion, implementation of the mandatory vaccination policy and associated leave without pay processing, vacation/compensatory leave cash-out, and others including strike-period leave without pay processing in 2023.

• Public Services and Procurement Canada administers payroll for more than 430,000 current and former employees on a bi-weekly basis
• The Public Service Pay Centre provides full compensation advisory services to approximately 250,000 active employees