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Audit tells feds to learn from Phoenix mistakes

A recent audit of the Phoenix pay system has confirmed what the federal government has thought all along – the system was a major failure of project management and oversight.
carla qualtrough
Delta MP Carla Qualtrough, the minister for public services and procurement who has been tasked with fixing the system, said there was nothing surprising in the audit.

A recent audit of the Phoenix pay system has confirmed what the federal government has thought all along – the system was a major failure of project management and oversight.

Last week, Auditor General Michael Ferguson released a series of audits and reports on several government programs.

Ferguson said the audit was important because the Phoenix pay system is less efficient and less cost-effective than the old system, and thousands of employees have not been paid accurately or paid on time.

“We found that the problems were having serious financial impacts on the federal government and its employees,” said Ferguson. “It is important that the government learn from the mistakes made in the Phoenix project in order to properly manage future large information technology projects.”

Delta MP Carla Qualtrough, the minister for public services and procurement who has been tasked with fixing the system, said there was nothing surprising in the audit.

“We had taken the time coming into this to do our own assessment of where we thought things went wrong and this validated a lot of what had happened,” Qualtrough said. “It was hard to hear. It is a matter for me… I’m so focused on fixing this and I’m so focused on the people who have been impacted by this, I don’t have a lot of time for the blame game, but it is important to find out why this happened.”

Ferguson’s recommendations when government undertakes technology projects in the future is to ensure there is proper oversight in place, strong governance in place, the system is tested properly and that enough resources, both human and financial, are put in place.

“These are things that we as a government have already put in place through policy and governance,” she said. “Clearly, there were many mistakes made and we will learn from them all.”

Qualtrough said she is cautiously optimistic the worst is over.

“We have had a number of pay periods where the backlog has gone down kind of marginally. It is not going down as quickly as we would have liked, but it’s not going up for a number of months,” she said. “We remain focused on helping employees facing pay issues.”