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With Phoenix, Lemay said the Miramichi pay centre receives about 80,000 new pay requests every month from the 46 departments it serves. Ideally, this workload should be handled cleared within the department’s service standard of processing transactions within 20 days.

But Lemay said processing speed “dropped sharply” after the Phoenix rollout in April. In May, only 40,000 transactions were handled. The hiring of more than 200 compensation advisers and employees getting used to the system, boosted processing to about 100,000 transactions a month in September and October.

Now that the department is churning out more files than it brings in, Lemay said the 200,000 files in the queue should start disappearing. She said all these transactions were entered directly into Phoenix so need less manual intervention, which means the queue should disappear faster than the original backlog.

The department, however, is still slow when it comes to meeting its service standards. She said it has only turned files around within its service standard about 20 to 30 per cent of the time.

Wednesday’s was the first briefing since the department confirmed it missed its Oct. 31 deadline to clear the backlog of pay problems for more than 82,000 public servants.

Lemay said the remaining 18,000 cases from that backlog pre-date Phoenix. They are several years old and require many “time-consuming calculations.”

She said the department had made these a priority so they can be done by the end of end of year to minimize the tax implications for employees.

The department has steered clear of setting any deadlines for clearing files or fixing Phoenix but a big looming deadline is year end when Phoenix has to churn out T-4 slips for 300,000 employees.

The department said T-4 slips will be issued but all fixes may not have been completed and could require adjustments into the next year.

The backlog cases are now handled by a dedicated team in Miramichi and all the other compensation advisers, including those temporarily hired at the various satellite offices, are handling regular pay transactions.