President of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada Debi Daviau (right) and vice-president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, Stéphane Aubry, are seen in a file photo. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

A major federal union is calling on the Liberal government to replace the troubled Phoenix pay system with a new one built by Canada’s public servants rather than the private sector.

Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), said after nearly two years of pay errors it’s time for the federal government to get a pay system that works. She said the union has lost faith in the government’s efforts to stabilize Phoenix, which already have cost $400 million — and the backlog of cases keeps growing.

“Despite all efforts to fix Phoenix, the number of open cases of pay problems has grown … with no end in sight. Enough is enough,” Daviau told reporters Tuesday.

“The government needs to stop throwing good money after bad and start investing in a system that works.”

Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough recently admitted that she had no idea how much more taxpayers would have to spend to fix Phoenix — and she could not guarantee that the final price tag would not hit $1 billion.

Daviau proposes the government create a “parallel process” using its own technology workers to develop a new pay system while the government continues to pay employees with Phoenix.

She said the government should hire more staff to clear the backlog and help employees affected by Phoenix. But her long-term solution is a new pay system, built on the latest version of PeopleSoft and adapted for the government, with its 27 collective agreements and 80,000 pay rules.

The government chose PeopleSoft — off-the-shelf software — as the basis for Phoenix and hired technology giant IBM to adapt it for government payroll.

Daviau said she is confident public servants could use the same off-the-shelf software, reconfigure it on new hardware and have it up and running before the government’s attempts to stabilize Phoenix bear fruit.

She said the proposal wouldn’t mean the government would have to hire more IT workers. It already has a core of about 70 employees who are working on Phoenix and some could be redeployed to building a new pay system.

“We already have the expertise and the people within the federal public service capable of designing and building it. They just need the opportunity to do so,” Daviau said.

“The longer the current government delays investing in a properly designed pay system, the longer it will continue to waste tens of millions of public dollars on private contracts to patch a faulty system that was broken from the start, and the longer federal employees will be made to suffer for a bad system.”

Daviau’s call is in keeping with PIPSC’s push to reduce the amount of federal government work that is being outsourced or contracted out. She has long argued that much of the work being farmed out could be done in-house by existing employees if they were given the opportunity and training.

Daviau earlier appealed to the government to cut its ties with IBM once the company fixes the technical problems currently dogging the system — problems that have seen large numbers of federal public servants overpaid, underpaid or not paid at all — and after the current implementation contact expires in 2019.

The original business case for Phoenix said a new pay system eventually would set the stage for pay operations to be outsourced — a move that appealed to the previous Conservative government as it worked to shrink the public service, but wasn’t pursued because a new system would have to be built first.

The Liberal government, however, has so far been committed to fixing Phoenix rather than launching a second track to build another system.

There isn’t much confidence out there that a second system would succeed where Phoenix failed because of the complexities of the pay system. A separate system also would would divert attention, staff and resources from the work on Phoenix.

PIPSC’s call comes as Treasury Board gets ready to roll out a comprehensive “HR to pay” training plan for all employees.

All departments use Phoenix, but human resources systems and the way they connect to Phoenix vary among departments. The training is tailored to specific departments, as well as managers, human resources personnel and compensation advisers.

PIPSC’s proposal is also at odds with the government’s latest push to change the way it plans and buys IT, which relies more on the private sector.

The big change will be in efforts to simplify the procurement process, get away from big IT projects and tackle more projects in pieces, with the help of industry.

In fact, one of the big lessons from consulting firm Goss Gilroy’s study of the pay project was that the government should work more with the private sector, especially in the planning stages of major IT projects.

The study didn’t assess the public service’s capacity to undertake a big project like Phoenix but concluded the “public service and the private sector together “possess the correct set of capabilities and capacities to successfully manage and implement such initiatives in the future.”

Among the biggest problems for Phoenix are the layers of complex rules that have been negotiated in collective agreements with unions over the years.

Many argue the government and unions should have dramatically streamlined those rules before even starting work on Phoenix. Those rules would still be the biggest challenge in building a new system. Unions, however, are unwilling to make concessions that look like they are rolling back hard-won gains for their members.