Federal executives say it’s about time they get paid the raises they were given months ago.

The 6,500 executives received a six per cent raise in June, but were told they wouldn’t actually receive their raises or back pay until the calamitous Phoenix pay system finished paying the increases owed to unionized employees under new collective agreements.

The delay is becoming an irritant for many executives who have already cited pay as a simmering issue in a health and work survey conducted by the Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (APEX) earlier this year.

New or promoted executives are getting job offers at the new higher salaries, but they continue to be paid at the old rates. And then there are payments for performance pay and bonuses, which are not only late, but are also being calculated at old salary rates.

APEX is now asking newly minted Chief Human Resources Officer Nancy Chahwan to confirm when executives can get paid because it appears the backlog of collective bargaining transactions has declined significantly and only the most intractable cases remain.

“The raises announced in June go back almost five years and people have been waiting that long for economic increases,” said Michel Vermette, APEX’s chief executive officer.

The six per cent salary increase covered four years and essentially matched the basic settlement negotiated with the 18 federal unions over the past several years. Deputy ministers and other heads of agencies are in line for the same increase.

Executives will eventually receive .75 per cent increase for 2015 and 2016 and 1.25 per cent in each of the next two years. They will also get an additional “wage adjustment” top-up for 2016-17.

The increase came with no target date for paying executives. Rather, Treasury Board issued a notice that executive raises wouldn’t be processed until Phoenix implemented the collective agreements of the “majority” of unionized employees.

Public Services and Procurement Canada has yet to say when Phoenix will complete the wage adjustments owed under those contracts. It has reported, however, that outstanding collective agreement transactions have stood at about 12,000 for the past several months – a far cry from the 50,000 or more a few months earlier.

With the number settled at 12,000, APEX argues that only the toughest cases remain in the backlog so the condition that the “majority” of unionized employees have received their increases has been “met” so it’s time executives got their raises.

“We consider this condition to have been met and have asked the chief human resources officer to confirm when our increases would be processed,” said APEX in a recent newsletter to members.

In an email, PSPC officials said the 12,000 outstanding cases are ones that Phoenix can’t handle without “manual intervention by a compensation adviser.” It noted that employees often have more than one transaction created by the processing of their collective agreements.

It also said the government is signing and adding new collective agreements to Phoenix’s workload on an ongoing basis. These contracts trigger transactions for existing and retired employees.

PSPC has also promised a pay review for every public servant to ensure the accuracy of payments under collective agreements.

By last month, Treasury Board has reached 25 contract settlements with 99 per cent of the public service. Collective agreements with the federal pilots and ship officers are the only two that have yet to settled. Both are awaiting arbitration decisions later this fall.

Similarly, the government has reached 28 collective agreements covering about 88 per cent of the separate agencies.

Those agreements are or will be expiring in the coming months and the unions and Treasury Board have already launched a new round of collective bargaining.

The deluge of collective agreements over the past two years proved disastrous for Phoenix. The system didn’t have the needed retroactive functions for back pay; faced a shortage of compensation advisers and much of the work had to be done manually with data retrieved from the old pay system most pay advisers had never worked on.

But the government doesn’t face the same pressure with executives as it does with unionized employees. They are management, don’t belong to unions and don’t have collective agreements with deadlines for implementing their raises and back pay.

Executives, however, get performance pay and Phoenix has contributed to months of delays in those payments for the past three years.

Vermette said many departments have not informed executives about their performance ratings for the fiscal year that ended six months ago.

Treasury Board sets spending limits for departments on performance pay based on a percentage of their executive payroll. Departments can divide up their budgets once Treasury Board reviews their plans. Departments can’t issue performance pay until those plans are approved. The deadline used to be the end of June but since Phoenix it has been bumped to the end of August.