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The extra hours are spent resolving tens of thousands of over- and underpayment cases for employees across the country and even at Canadian offices abroad.

We did not create this Phoenix problem, but we are going to fix it

As of the end of October, there were still 303,000 transactions with financial impact to employees waiting to be resolved, over and above the 80,000 transactions that Public Services and Procurement Canada considers to be a “normal workload.” According to the department, the backlog had gone down by 8,000 cases since mid-September and by 81,000 since January. There was also a pile of 91,500 inquiries or transactions with no financial impact.

“Our government remains focused on stabilizing the Phoenix pay system and resolving these unacceptable issues, which continue to be our number one priority,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said during question period earlier this month.

“We did not create this Phoenix problem, but we are going to fix it.”

It was the Conservative government that in 2009 decided to replace the government’s old pay system, and began the process of centralizing payroll managers in Miramichi instead of housing them within individual departments. But it was the Liberal government that went ahead with an initial rollout of the new Phoenix system in February 2016. Despite early problems it proceeded with an even wider implementation two months later.

Bureaucrats estimated the new IBM system could run more smoothly than the old one, which cost $230 million a year to operate, and save about $70 million in annual operating costs. Instead it’s costing more than twice as much and in the worst cases glitches have caused employees to go without pay for months on end. For its part, IBM has tried to absolve itself saying it warned the government about potential issues well in advance of the rollout.

Canada’s Auditor General, Michael Ferguson, issued a report in the spring that called the project “an incomprehensible failure.”

• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com | Twitter: mariedanielles