The federal government’s interminable
Phoenix pay system fiasco reinforces the need to bring meaningful accountability to the ranks of government bureaucracy, especially at its most senior level.
At that altitude, connection with marketplace realities and fiscal discipline too often gets obscured in the cloistered atmosphere of civil service management.
After all, the money and other resources being invested in projects belong to neither the senior bureaucrat nor his or her company. The Canadian taxpayer, as always, is on the hook for any bureaucratic bungling, incompetence and miscalculation.
The soap opera over the initiative to replace the federal government’s 40-year-old system to pay its 290,000 employees in 101 government departments and agencies began almost a decade ago.
The recent federal auditor general’s report on the inept execution of the initiative involving an annual payroll of roughly $22 billion would be comical were it not so costly for taxpayers – and so potentially financially damaging for many of the employees on the receiving end of another top-down delivery of an ill-advised overhaul that the auditor general’s report noted is less efficient and less cost effective than the old system. Fixing it will also take years and require millions more taxpayer dollars.
The inventory of Phoenix implementation ineptitude amassed since 2009 is too long for this small allocation of print. But here’s a succinct summation from the auditor general: “the Phoenix project was an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight.”
The details of that failure are contained in the auditor general’s Phoenix report, which should be required reading for all citizens who care about how their tax dollars are spent and who is in charge of delivering the services those hard-earned dollars support.
However, in the wake of the report, two key questions remain: who, specifically, is responsible for that incomprehensible failure, and how do taxpayers ensure that it does not happen again?
