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Photo by Tony Caldwell / OTTwp

“We’re here to send the message that this government has to put more resources into fixing Phoenix and the have to compensate our members for the stress they’ve been under for the last three years,” said Aylward. “The whole Phoenix thing right now, over the past three years payday after payday, whether you’ve been affected or not, you still woke up wondering, ‘am I going to get paid this week’. You’ve had that stress. We’re asking this government to come forward now and compensate our members for that stress.”

Aylward also called for more resources to deal with the backlog of payment issues that have accumulated since 2006. He said until that backlog is dealt with, the government can’t move forward to replace Phoenix with a new payment system.

Photo by Tony Caldwell / OTTwp

This month marks three years since the rollout of Phoenix, which has resulted in more than half of federal employees being overpaid, underpaid or not paid at all.

The government has slowly whittled away at the massive backlog of issues, but at least 275,000 transactions remained unresolved as of Jan. 23, according to the public service pay centre’s most recent information dashboard.

One of the employees who was affected is Alan Craig who is the chair of the Conseil régional d’action politique de l’Outaouais at PSAC.

Craig said he was marching early Thursday because he wants to see the system fixed. A glitch in Phoenix saw him overpaid. When the issue was addressed, the government removed taxes from the net sum of the over payment, essentially forcing him to pay taxes on that income twice.