There is lots of blame to go around for the Phoenix pay crisis, but will Auditor General Michael Ferguson determine who is ultimately accountable for one of the colossal public management failures in Canadian history?

Not likely.

“How can you point to one person? The whole initiative had so many hands in the soup that trying to find the culprit is like grabbing smoke,” said Donald Savoie, one of Canada’s leading public administration experts.

“I bet dollars to donuts the auditor general will say he found lots of problems by several people, but he can’t point the finger at one. It is not doable.”

On Tuesday, Ferguson delivers his second and much-awaited report on Phoenix, putting the decade-long planning and implementation of the faulty pay system, under the microscope.

But many say Ferguson’s report will reveal a broader cultural problem — the weakness of accountability in modern government that is increasing the risk of project failures, financial mismanagement and the loss of trust in government.

Many expect it will raise questions about the competence of Public Services and Procurement Canada, the federal paymaster responsible for Phoenix, and the senior project team’s ability to manage a complex project that would transform how people work and are paid.

At the same time, a culture has grown up around ‘blame avoidance,’ downplaying or obscuring the facts when things go wrong — dangerously eroding the sacred principle of “speaking truth to power” that the public service and democracy is built upon.

Elmer MacKay, long-time Conservative politician and cabinet minister, best summed up the state of accountability in government, said Savoie: “There is never a culprit in Ottawa.” MacKay felt his biggest frustration as an MP and minister was no matter what went wrong, “there was never a culprit.”

But Savoie said ‘finding a culprit’ shapes the culture and drives so much of what government does. Canadians paying the $1-billion and counting for Phoenix want someone to blame and so do politicians and the thousands of federal employees who faced hardships because of botched pay cheques.

The public service, however, dodges blame and argues failure is an opportunity to learn lessons for the future, said Savoie. Both senior bureaucrats and Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough, have often said the priority is to fix Phoenix and build on lessons learned so it never happens again, not finding someone to blame.

“It’s time to think if the bureaucracy model we have had since the 1850s still works. There are serious flaws to be addressed and Phoenix defines the problem: You can’t find a culprit. Can Canadians and politicians live in a world where we will be never be able to find the culprit,” said Savoie.

“Phoenix speaks to the inability of modern government to grab a project, identify the people responsible for it, and say ‘run with it and see you at the finish line.’ There is no finish line in government anymore. It’s always a moving target. It’s like Shared Services or any major project where there are so many hands in the soup. That defines modern government.”

Conservative Senator Elizabeth Marshall, a former auditor-general, expects Ferguson’s report will put together the Phoenix puzzle rather than lay blame.

“I would be surprised if assigns blame but I could be wrong. Audits are strange beasts. They don’t always deliver what you think and others deliver things you would never have expected.

Ferguson has said the audit is about the “whole project management” from business case to implementation in February 2016.

His report goes back to when the massive ‘pay transformation’ project, of which Phoenix is a part, was conceived under the Conservatives in 2009 and why senior management made the decisions they did in managing the project.

The central players are the project management team, centered at PSPC’s accounting, banking and compensation branch – the same branch that rolled out the successful pension modernization plan a few years earlier.

Ferguson examined what the team did to make sure the system and public servants using Phoenix were ready to go live. Was it tested and secure, and could it deliver the functions to pay people? He looked at whether PSPC supported departments in making the move to Phoenix.

He didn’t examine the IBM contract because the Phoenix team managed the project and took the risks.

The big mystery is what went into the decisions that proved so disastrous for Phoenix.

It’s confounding that Phoenix wasn’t fully tested; the pilot was cancelled and warnings of experts, other departments and even IBM — the IT giant that built Phoenix — to stop or delay rollout were ignored. Unions pleaded to stop or delay going live.

The project team decided to scrap IBM’s planned change management and training and drop critical pay functions – including the processing of retroactivity – to ensure Phoenix went live by its target date.

And many have wondered why senior bureaucrats ever charged ahead with a risky plan built on booking savings, laying off 1,200 pay experts and mothballing the old pay system before knowing if Phoenix even worked.

PSPC led the project, but what about Treasury Board, Privy Council Office, the Office of the Comptroller General, the Chief Human Resources Officer and the army of public servants on the various Phoenix committees, which all had roles to play in the implementation?

Goss Gilroy, the consultants Treasury Board hired to examine the fiasco, found a culture of burying the ‘bad news’ at PSPC and across government. Briefings with ‘bad news’ were discouraged and typically presented rosier pictures of progress and minimized concerns.

The report said it was unclear whether the Phoenix management team was unaware of the problems; unwilling to accept them or thought they could be addressed. They also found people believed the team knew what it was doing.

“This practice of not providing briefings that contained bad news was exacerbated by a tendency to accord a great deal of leeway to managers with a good track record of managing projects,” the report said.

Some, however, suggested the project management team was over its head and didn’t see the crash coming because it was so confident the situation was in hand.

In fact, Goss Gilroy found many problems boiled down to the project team grossly underestimating the scope of change they were bringing to government. It saw compensation advisers as low-ranking employees, not pay experts, and saw the project as little more than “replacing a calculator.”

Ferguson hinted at the same issues in his first Phoenix report.

“Public Services did not have a full understanding of the extent and causes of pay problems. Until a year after Phoenix was launched, the department was still responding to pay problems as they arose.”

Indeed, project leaders Brigitte Fortin and Rosanna Di Paolo assured reporters in the days after Phoenix went live that glitches were merely the result of the normal learning curve for a large project that would be worked out as people mastered it.

Experts have sounded the alarm about the blurring lines of accountability for years. It was at the heart of Justice John Gomery’s probe into the sponsorship scandal and some say the blurring became worse with the compliance regime imposed by the Federal Accountability Act.

“Phoenix seems to confirm the lesson of the sponsorship scandal: we still have a grey zone of accountability between deputy ministers and their political masters and the accountability act has done nothing to fix it,” said Ralph Heintzman, a professor at the University of Ottawa.

Maryantonett Flumian, a former deputy minister and director of Blockchain Research Institute, calls Phoenix a massive ‘governance’ failure that drives home how accountability has to be “reconceived” in a complex world. All the government’s challenges, from climate change to Indigenous affairs, involve multiple players and jurisdictions that demand “shared accountability.”

Heintzman has long proposed a new ‘moral’ charter to strengthen the lines of accountability between bureaucrats, politicians and the public they serve. He said a charter wouldn’t have stopped a massive failure like Phoenix, but it would have given public servants the tools to speak truth to power.

Phoenix was planned and built entirely during the Harper era, when avoiding blame ran particularly high among public servants.

Their relationship with the cost-cutting Tories was tense. They felt side-lined, untrusted, their advice unwanted and neutrality under assault. The government wanted them to implement and execute without question or debate.

“I think there has been, in recent years, a chilling impact and the fear of being perceived as obstructionist is more elevated than in the past,” said Karl Salgo, executive director of public governance at the Institute on Governance.

“This was a culture in which no one wanted to come across as a Cassandra or naysayer when decisions are being taken.”

Salgo, who teaches a course on risk-management, argues the public service is actually more “blame-averse than risk-averse.” Public servants are more likely to be called out on “sins of commission than sins of omission” so they tend to stick with the status quo.

“One thing public servants do is complete their mistakes. Once something is underway, it’s hard for anyone to say ‘let’s cut our losses’ or ‘stop, we have it wrong.’ The mindset is to fix it, tinker, rather than scrap it. The culture is to try and salvage the lemon.”’

And all the experts agree there is only one way to change culture — through leadership.

“It needs to be led from the top. The leaders need to model the fact that failures are okay as long as they’re flagged early. A failure such as Phoenix is not okay because nobody caught it and nobody said anything until it was too late, said Goss Gilroy’s Sandy Moir during a Senate hearing.

Whatever Ferguson finds, the government will be under pressure to find better ways to deal performance – good and bad.

It recently changed the rules to claw back the performance pay of deputy ministers, associate deputy ministers and heads of Crown corporations if they are found guilty of misconduct or mismanagement – even after they have retired.

The claw back won’t apply to deputy ministers or associate deputy ministers accountable for Phoenix because they will be grandfathered under the old rules. It also doesn’t cover the ranks of the Phoenix management team and the other 6,480 executives in government.

But the push is on for that claw back policy to extend to all executives.

The largest federal union has already argued no executives should get performance pay until Phoenix is fixed and rank-and-file employees are paid properly.

As she left politics, former Public Services Minister Judy Foote said she didn’t think the senior executives who led her department’s implementation of the ill-fated Phoenix deserved performance pay – but the decision was not hers.

Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), said the Phoenix project team made bad management decisions and if that’s because they ignored warnings or sent the wrong information up the chain of command, they should be singled out and punished for it.

“At the end of the day, bureaucrats are to blame,” she said. “They were charged to save money and made devastating decisions, all in the interests of pleasing the government, not whether they had a system that worked.”

Phoenix Planning and Implementation

WHAT: The Harper government approved a two-part overhaul of the federal pay system called the “Transformation of Pay Initiative.” The $309 million plan included centralizing federal pay operations in Miramichi, N.B. and implementing a new pay system called Phoenix to pay 300,000 employees in 101 departments.

WHEN: The project was planned, designed and built over seven years, beginning in 2009, with Phoenix rolled out in a first wave in February 2016.

WHO?

The Ministers: The project was led by Public Works and Government Services Canada – now Public Services and Procurement Canada under three Conservative ministers: Christian Paradis, Rona Ambrose and Diane Finley. The Liberals came to power in 2015 and Judy Foote headed the department when Phoenix went live. She was replaced by Carla Qualtrough.

The Deputy Ministers: The project has been overseen by four deputy ministers: François Guimont; Michelle d’Auray and George Da Pont. Da Pont retired in April 2016 before the second wave of the Phoenix rollout and was replaced by the current deputy minister Marie Lemay.

Associate Deputy Ministers: Andrew Treusch, Renée Jolicoeur and Gavin Liddy. In 2014, Jolicoeur won the public service outstanding achievement award for leading the pay and pension projects.

The current associate deputy minister Les Linklater is in charge of stabilizing Phoenix.

Phoenix Management Team:

Brigitte Fortin: assistant deputy minister of PSPC’s accounting, banking and compensation branch. Retired in January 2017.

assistant deputy minister of PSPC’s accounting, banking and compensation branch. Retired in January 2017. Rosanna Di Paola: associate ADM who also worked on the original business plan. She was shuffled out of the post to become a special adviser to Lemay in September 2017. She is now the ADM special projects at the department’s Quebec Regional office.