A Liberal star candidate and the Phoenix pay system ‘nightmare’

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Ottawa – Liberals are excited about a high-profile candidate on Lasalle’s Montreal ride – Émard-Verdun, but Claude Guay’s candidacy has caught an eyebrow among public officials because of his role in the typical Phoenix Payroll system of the government’s scandal.

Former IBM Canada president Guay is running against the Montreal Fortress by former Liberty Commission ministers Scott Brison and David Lametti, and the party failed in a side lesson in September.

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The party touted him as a member of the “strong economic team” composed of liberal Mark Carney, former Quebec finance minister Carlos Leitao and Canadian finance minister François Philip Champagne.

Sources called Guai a “potential minister” because his business certificate was strong.

But the president, the largest civil service coalition, said his candidacy “has raised attention to liberal commitment to a compensation system that addresses losses.”

“For nearly a decade, Phoenix has been a nightmare for federal workers, and the government’s flawed contract with IBM is an important part of the problem,” Sharon Desousa, a Canadian Public Service Alliance, said in a statement to the National Post.

In 2017, Guay admitted in an interview that his company made a mistake in the Phoenix launch.

When he told Montreal, he told Montreal when he was still general manager of IBM Global Business Services in Canada.

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“There has been success in the program,” he added.

He wrote in a statement Wednesday that he “has repeatedly highlighted the shortcomings of the Phoenix system.”

“I am riding on Lasalle-émard-Verdun of the Canadian Liberal Party because I am honored to represent my fellow countrymen in the House of Commons,” he said.

Sources within the federal government said that liberals would think it would be a good idea to use him as a candidate, which is “incredible”. Not because of personal, but because of the message it conveys to federal employees and Canadians.

“To be honest, we have public service staff who feel chill when they hear the name IBM,” one source said.

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IBM has won billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government over the past decade, according to open data. IBM has received at least $784 million for Phoenix alone, according to the Investigative News Program. The initial contract was worth $6 million in 2011.

It all started in 2009, when the Harper administration completely changed the way it handled 290,000 federal employees.

At the time, the government wanted to concentrate on payroll services for 46 departments and agencies, which accounted for 70% of all federal employees. But it also hopes to replace the 40-year-old compensation system used by 101 departments and institutions.

The flaw system was implemented in 2016 months after the Liberal Party came to power.

To this day, thousands of civil servants have not received proper payments.

The Auditor General concluded in a harsh 2018 report that the system has made the system unstable from the outset, which is just one of the “uncomprehensible failures” of the government.

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The system has since cost more than $4 billion and the federal government is working to replace it. PSAC, which relies on government service standards, said that nine years after its launch, only 26% of compensation cases were processed on time.

“They believe they provide an effective software application,” IBM officials said in a Senate report highlighting the collapse of Phoenix.

“They think that replacing software will not solve the government’s compensation problem. On the other hand, wage center employees say that the current system will produce too many unexplained errors and require too much manual intervention,” the report said.

Liberals have not solved all the problems in the past decade. Public sector unions say they just want an effective system and a government that will take the issue seriously.

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“We expect the next government’s strong mandate to resolve the Phoenix disaster once and for all and make sure every worker pays correctly on time. There are no more excuses,” Desousa said.

State Post
atrepanier@postmedia.com

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