Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. opposition member for her interest in this matter.

I can assure the House that we on this side of the House are just as concerned as anyone else by the performance of the Government of Canada pay system. We want to assure the House that public servants are being paid for the work that they do.

Nearly 300,000 public servants from 101 departments and agencies receive more than $500 million in payments through the Phoenix payroll system for every pay period.

As we have already said, representatives from our department are working hard to ensure that every employee is getting paid what they are owed. Temporary satellite pay offices were set up this summer to help resolve the pay problems while allowing the ongoing processing of regular transactions. The system is being improved and efforts are being made to streamline processes and increase efficiency.

In addition, measures have been taken to ensure that employees and managers across the public service get the information and training they need to use the Phoenix system efficiently and effectively. Compensation employees are working day and night, seven days a week, to clear the backlog and ensure that each and every Government of Canada employee is paid accurately.

To date, we have ensured that 64,000 employees have had their cases resolved. However, because many employees have multiple transactions, there remains work to do.

Currently, there are approximately 18,000 employees with some form of outstanding pay transactions remaining in the backlog. Examples of these cases are terminations that involve multiple transactions and changes to pay as a result of acting assignments. They require a fair amount of research to ensure that we are capturing proper pay amounts from those periods.

Each month, the Public Service Pay Centre in Miramichi receives a constant stream of new pay transactions to process.

As a result, the pay centre still has some 80,000 transactions in the processing queue. Usually, these transactions would be processed in accordance with the established service standards. However, right now, employees are waiting too long to be paid.

Most new pay requests are expected to be processed within 20 days, but we are only meeting our service standards 20% to 30% of the time. Because of this slowdown in processing, the number of transactions in the system has expanded, so that we now have more than two months of additional work, representing 200,000 transactions. We will progressively return to normal processing over the next few months.

We have said that there is no reason why any federal government employee should go without pay. Employees can request emergency salary advances through their own departments, and these payments can be issued within 24 to 48 hours. Anyone having difficulty receiving emergency pay should seek assistance through the online feedback form for Phoenix.

We are working hard to address these problems, and we will do just that.

Leona Alleslev

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Adjournment Proceedings

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