The Public Service Pay Centre in Miramichi, N.B., the home of the Pay Pod people. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ron Ward

The Trudeau government isn’t going to let departments opt out of the troubled Phoenix pay system and take over paying their own employees.

Steve MacKinnon, parliamentary secretary to Public Services and Procurement Canada, put the kibosh on a union push for the government to let Canada Revenue Agency dump Phoenix and modify an existing in-house system to pay its employees.

PSPC is the government’s pay master. CRA would need a change in legislation to allow it to pay its 40,000 employees.

MacKinnon said the proposal is not a “substitute system” for Phoenix. He said the government remains focused on stabilizing Phoenix and isn’t interested in having “multiple pay technologies being run in the public service.”

“At first blush, the suggestion doesn’t offer us a short term fix and one of the things that we have been consistent on … is that there is no alternative to stabilizing Phoenix.” said MacKinnnon.

“Our focus is on stabilizing Phoenix and making sure people are paid accurately and on time. That is the obsession and we are not in support of efforts that would detract from that.

The federal budget gave the PSPC more than $431 million to stabilize Phoenix and Treasury Board another $16 million to start a search for a new system that will eventually replace Phoenix.

But MacKinnon said the government is certainly willing to look at existing systems and business processes that are working well, which could be tapped to help stabilize Phoenix or used in shaping the troubled pay system’s replacement.

The two unions representing the 40,000 employees at the tax agency are lobbying the Trudeau government for a change in CRA’s mandate that would allow it to pay its own employees using an existing in-house corporate administrative system – known as CAS — and stop using Phoenix.

They argue modifying the CAS system is worth exploring as a faster and cheaper interim solution to pay workers while the government searches for a new pay system that will eventually replace Phoenix.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC) has gone so far as to suggest CRA could pay other departments or there may be other systems, such as the mothballed regional pay system that Phoenix replaced, which could be modified and reactivated in the short term.

CRA’s technology workers, who are represented by PIPSC, say a conversion is possible and suggested in an online statement that pay files could be transitioned to revamped CAS within six to nine months.

CRA officials have rejected that timeline. The agency has also not asked to leave Phoenix.

Daviau argues that even upgrade and move took several years would be better than the uncertainty hanging over employees relying on the fickle Phoenix which could take five or six years to replace.

The CRA uses CAS to directly enter data into Phoenix. The system, built using SAP software, was created as help manage finance and human resources for the old Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, which was re-organized in 2003 and split into two departments: CRA and the CBSA.

CBSA still uses CAS and under the union’s proposal would also opt out of Phoenix.

Before Phoenix, CAS did all the payroll calculations and sent the information to the old regional pay system to issue pay cheques.

Daviau said the CAS system has been doing all the necessary pay day calculations and payroll costing, which are sent to Phoenix for final processing and payment every two weeks so there is no reason this couldn’t be expanded to “actually cut the pay cheques.”

But MacKinnon said CAS was not built as a pay system and as currently configured couldn’t replace Phoenix in the “short, medium or long term.”

He said it was built specifically for CRA andcouldn’t handle other departments without a massive reconfiguration and customization. On top of that, the system is “getting long in the tooth” and requires a significant update.

Daviau has been making the pitch to CRA management and Ottawa area MPs and intends to formally submit a written proposal to the government to consider letting CRA go alone and adapt CAS into a full-blown pay system.

PIPSC initiated the push for the government to scrap Phoenix and start over on a new pay system.

This is the first time unions have pushed for departments to dump Phoenix. CRA is the biggest federal agency and with CBSA they account for nearly 20 per cent of the public servants paid by Phoenix. The Senate is the only federal institution that has opted to leave Phoenix.

Defections from Phoenix would upset the government’s longstanding plan for a centralized pay system for all departments.

But it would also create chaos after PSPC has spent months re-engineering business processes around Phoenix technology, including a massive training programs tailored to the patchwork of human resources system in the federal government that feed information to Phoenix.