Sen. Percy Mockler, centre, chair of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, sits with deputy chairs Sen. Mobina Jaffer, left, and Sen. Andre Pratte, of the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance, listen to questions during a press conference on their report on the Phoenix pay system, in Ottawa on July 31, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Senators are defending their decision to not haul Phoenix project executives — a handful of top bureaucrats that pushed the government’s problem-plagued pay system project ahead despite major red flags that it wasn’t ready to go online — in front of the Senate finance committee for public testimony.

Senators said they shied away from assigning blame to specific people because the problems that led to Phoenix were more complex than just a few at the top. At the same time, they expressed dismay that no one has accepted responsibility or has been held to account.

Liberal Sen. Mobina Jaffer said “the buck stops at the minister’s doors” and hauling those individuals in front of the committee for their study on the system wouldn’t have helped find long-term solutions.

Independent Sen. André Pratte said the responsibility for the project’s massive failure is shared with many other people and institutions who could have “stopped the train before the collision.”

“It would be too simple to just say there were three executives and let’s have them as witnesses and target them by saying they’re responsible, and saying ‘that’s it, that’s the end of the problem,'” he said. “It’s much more complicated than that.”

The auditor general’s May report on the system’s problems singled out a handful of Phoenix executives, but he refused to name them and instead blamed cultural problems within the public service for the project’s failure.

Conservative Sen. Percy Mockler, who chairs the committee, said senators are “not here to play the blame game” but instead help the government “rebuild from the ashes of this disaster.”

The Senate committee released its report Tuesday on the Phoenix pay system, an epic train wreck of a cost-savings project that led to tens of thousands of public servants getting improperly paid — sometimes not at all — and ran up unexpected costs into the billions.

At a news conference outlining the results of their study, the committee called for more accountability and transparency into the project.

The report said the federal government should report to Parliament on every step it takes on fixing the Phoenix pay system and explain what kind of options it’s considering to replace it in the long-run.

Senators said more parliamentary oversight is needed because they found a dismaying lack of independent review over the project.

They echoed numerous calls for a cultural change within the public service, which have stemmed from the auditor general’s scathing report which documents the project’s many problems.

Pratte said they’re not confident the government has learned its lesson on Phoenix.

“We’re not confident that the lessons have been learned and that the basic problem that explains the fiasco – that is, the cultural problem behind all this – has been addressed. Or even admitted,” he said.

“The auditor general said the first step to address the cultural problem is admit that it exists,” Pratte said. “The clerk of the privy council, when he appeared before the committee, said there is no cultural problem in the management of the public service.”

Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s report blamed a culture in the public service that has led to short-term thinking, focusing on meeting performance targets and pleasing politicians.

But when Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick testified, he took issue with Ferguson’s description of those cultural problems and called it an “opinion piece.”

The unanimous Senate committee report sided with Ferguson, saying the government needs to “move away from a culture that plays down bad news and avoids responsibility.”

Senators called it an “international embarrassment” that Canada has been unable to properly pay its own employees.

Their report said Ottawa should consider whether some departments with “complex pay requirements,” like shift work, should be moved over to an alternative system rather than sticking it out with Phoenix.

The Senate itself had dispatched with Phoenix as its own payroll system after it experienced long processing delays.

Their report said in the short-term, the government needs to process outstanding pay requests and publicly set out targets for the time to process these requests.

It also said pay advisers working with the system were not properly trained.

The report cited information from the Treasury Board that pegged the “total unplanned costs” for running and fixing the system at about $2.2 billion over a seven-year period.

Last month, a report from the government’s chief financial officer suggested that Phoenix could take five years before it becomes stable and cost an extra $500 million each year until it is finally fixed.

Approximately 152,517 out of 292,000 public servants were hit with pay problems as of the end of June last year (based on the number of outstanding pay requests), according to the auditor general’s report.