The federal government says the hiring of more staff and faster processing helped to reduce, for the fifth month in a row, the backlog of outstanding pay transactions botched by the beleaguered Phoenix pay system.

Public Services and Procurement Canada, the federal paymaster and department responsible for fixing Phoenix, released its June update Thursday showing the pile of transactions sitting in the pay centre’s queue was reduced by 13,000 files, inching the backlog down to 577,000 files.

The June update marks the latest monthly decline since the backlog peaked with 671,000 cases in January.

The decline is welcome news for PSPC, especially on the heels of a costing report, issued by the government’s chief financial officer, which estimated the error-prone Phoenix could take five years to ‘stabilize’ and cost up to $3.5 billion.

Public Services Minister Carla Qualtrough disagrees that Phoenix will take five years to fix. She hasn’t said how long it would take, but she argued in an interview with iPolitics that the various fixes, combined with the hiring of 1,500 compensation staff and the new pay pods being rolled out across government, will accelerate processing and shrink the backlog much faster.

But there is another queue of transactions waiting in the wings to be processed by Phoenix.

More than 8,200 border services officers, represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada, have just signed a contract this week, triggering the 150-day countdown to when the government has to implement the salary increases and retroactive payments

The government also gave 6,500 federal executives a six per cent salary increase, which essentially matches the basic raises negotiated with the 18 union over the past several years. They were told, however, that they won’t get any money until the troubled Phoenix system pays all unionized employees what they are owed.

But the possibility of a $3.5 billion price-tag has cranked up the pressure to get Phoenix stabilized as quickly as possible. More than half of the 300,000 public servants paid by Phoenix have some kind of outstanding pay issue.

And the unions, feeling the backlash of their own members, are losing patience.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) has vowed to escalate action in the 16 months before the 2019 election and last week launched a Facebook campaign to tell Canadians the personal and financial hardships public servants faced because of more than two years of botched pay cheques.

“Most people would quit their job if their employer stopped paying them properly, but federal public service workers keep showing up to work day after day. We want to make sure Canadians everywhere know about their commitment and dedication,” said PSAC President Chris Aylward.

PSAC plans to ramp up that campaign in the fall with television and online video ads highlighting how public servants have faithfully done their jobs throughout the pay crisis. The campaign will be focused on the Trudeau government, as the employer, in a bid to settle with public servants before the 2019 election.

The government and union just launched a new round of collective bargaining. At the same time, separate talks have been underway to negotiate damages to compensate public servants for Phoenix foul-ups. Those talks seem to have stalled.

Any damages have not been factored into the projected $3.5 billion to fix Phoenix.

PSAC has also asked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call a public inquiry into the Phoenix disaster, including the culture in the public service that contributed to such a massive project management failure.

“We were clear with the government that if they continued their inaction on important issues with Phoenix, we would escalate our actions,” said Aylward.

PSAC is also launching a web-based training program for ‘pay advocates’or volunteers to help colleagues deal with and resolve their pay problems.

The government has set up all kinds of processes, extra staff and call centres for this but the union says employees are still falling through the cracks. This ‘peer-to-peer‘assistance plan is also aimed at reducing the amount of time employees waste in the workplace trying to figure out how to fix their pay.

Meanwhile, PSPC continues with its fixes and rolling out the pay pods across government by mid-2019 that it expects will further hasten processing and reduce the backlog.

The pods are teams of compensation advisors working directly with departments. They will become experts in the collective agreements and the unique pay rules of a department.

The first pilot with three departments last year reduced their backlog by 33 per cent. At that rate, Qualtrough has said the three departments will be “stable” within 18 months.

The government has since created five pods covering 15 departments, which PSPC hopes will reduce their backlogs and stabilize pay operations within a similar amount of time.

According to the latest update, the 577,000 outstanding cases at the pay centre include 414,000 financial transactions; 108,000 general inquires or ‘non-financial’ transactions; 12,000 collective agreement transactions and 43,000 transactions waiting to be closed.

The pay centre can handle a normal monthly workload of about 80,000 cases: last month it was 334,000 beyond its capacity.

The pay centre received 72,000 pay requests between May 30 and June 27 and processed 85,000. It also processed an additional 4,000 transactions created by new four-year collective agreements for employees.

The rest of the departments, which use Phoenix, but process their own employees’ pay, face a stockpile of about 33,000 cases — either pay problems or unfinished transactions. The department only gets reports from 27 of the 53 departments that don’t use the pay centre.

At the same time, the number of regular pay transactions — excluding collective agreement transactions — processed within the 30-day service standard slipped to 50 per cent.

The department said it expects its ability to meet service standards will continue to fluctuate while the department is still wrestling with the volume of work created by collective agreements.