Important message to Government of Canada employees regarding public service pay issues

Last Wednesday, I provided an update on our progress in resolving public service pay issues.

We are focusing our efforts on two areas: closing cases remaining in our backlog, and moving toward our steady state by increasing our processing speed for incoming transactions.

Backlog

As previously explained, the remaining cases are extremely complex and require a number of time-consuming manual calculations. Almost all cases pre-date Phoenix, and some date back several years.

To date, we have closed pay transactions for over 90% of the employees in our backlog. However, because many employees have multiple transactions, there is still work to do. Currently, 18,366 employees with some form of outstanding pay transaction remain in the backlog.

Workflow

Each month, our Pay Centre in Miramichi receives a constant flow of new pay transactions to process. As a result, at any given time, we have about 80,000 transactions in the system awaiting processing. Under normal conditions, this workload can be cleared within our service standards.

We are not yet meeting our service standards and some employees are waiting too long to receive the money they have earned. We are now processing more transactions than we are receiving and over the next several months, we will return to normal processing times.

Way forward to a steady state

As our group of dedicated compensation advisors in Miramichi and the satellite offices complete remaining cases in the backlog, the rest of our team is focusing on priority cases in the system that may cause financial hardship for employees and could have tax impacts, such as disability claims, returns from leave, terminations and new hires.

We have established a detailed model for processing pay requests and are testing it with departments, employees and unions to ensure we have a robust and reliable approach. We are also looking to see if there is a faster path we can take to get to our steady state.

Once we clear the backlog, our full complement of compensation advisors will be dedicated to regaining a steady and regular flow of transactions.

Conclusion

Thank you for your continued patience and understanding. We are all working as hard as we can to fix issues and process all employee pay transactions as quickly as possible.

Marie Lemay, P.Eng., ing.
Deputy Minister
Public Services and Procurement Canada