The Phoenix pay system foul-ups that left thousands of Canada’s public servants unpaid could have been avoided if all employees were forced to take mandatory training on how the system worked, the senior bureaucrat who oversaw the project suggested Wednesday.

Rosanna Di Paola, Public Services and Procurement Canada’s associate assistant deputy minister of accounting, banking and compensation, told a labour board hearing that when she looks back at what went wrong she now believes she should have pressed for mandatory training.

“To do it over again, I would have made the argument that training be mandatory for all users,” she testified.

“I can’t mandate training, but it’s the one thing, if I could do over, I would do.”

The problems with the Phoenix pay system are at the centre of a labour tribunal hearing into whether the federal government is breaking the law by not paying thousands of public servants properly and on time.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada is arguing at the four-day hearing of the Public Service Labour Relations and Employment Board that Phoenix pay glitches amount to an “unfair labour practice.” The union says the problems have effectively changed the terms and conditions of employment for public servants during a period of collective bargaining.

Di Paola acknowledged that people who aren’t being paid have every right to be angry and frustrated but said “yelling from the rooftop” that Phoenix doesn’t work won’t solve the problem.

As departments drilled down into the issues, Di Paola said, they found two “root causes” — the information public servants were plugging into the system was wrong or untimely, and the processing time of transactions at the Miramichi, N.B., pay centre were slower than expected.

There are “pieces” of the pay administration that are not working, she said, but Phoenix “as a technology is working.”

She said the 80,000 people in the backlog awaiting extra pay are not considered Phoenix problems. They ended up not getting paid what they are owed because the information was not put into the system properly.

Chris Aylward, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, said Wednesday he was dismayed at Di Paola’s explanations.

“Basically, what she did today was blame everyone else for this pay debacle, except that department that is responsible for paying employee,” he said.

Alyward questioned why the department didn’t insist on mandatory training for such a major system overhaul. He also objected to her insistence that the problem was not with the system but with the users.

“We’re talking 80,000 people who didn’t input their information properly? I find that hard to believe. And there is no system problem or problem with the pay system? I find that extremely hard to believe,” Aylward said.

“It’s embarrassing when we have a manger responsible for the implementation of a new pay system who blames everyone else but the pay system itself … and (she’s saying) ‘It’s either your HR people or employees themselves who are not inputting data properly,” he said.

Phoenix was designed so the payroll and human resources systems are integrated. The government bought off-the-shelf software and “reconfigured” and “customized” it to handle the 80,000 pay rules and rates of pay for public servants.

“As long as the information is in Phoenix, people will get paid,” Di Paola said.

She said the department teamed up with the Canada School of the Public Service to develop training for public servants on how to use the system. The online program was aimed at all users. Departments who have opted out the school’s training programs were given CDs and training modules.

She said departments were responsible for assessing their own readiness to “go live” with Phoenix in February and April. She said the system was thoroughly tested between June 2014 and January 2016 to ensure the information from the human resource system was flowing to Phoenix like it was supposed to and all seemed to be working.

Di Paola said she was concerned when she began hearing thousands of people were facing pay problems after the second rollout.

She said the realization kicked in that people hadn’t mastered the system and the learning curve “was much longer than we expected.”

In hindsight, she said, training should have been mandatory. She said only deputy ministers could have made training mandatory and that, if she could do it all over gain, she would have pressed Treasury Board and senior management to make it so.

She said she provided regular monthly updates to the human resources community, stressing how critical it was that they master the system. She said concerns were raised along the way that human resources staff may not realize how central their role was to Phoenix’s success but she insisted she was “as sure as I could be” before both rollouts that they were ready.