Auditor General Michael Ferguson holds a press conference at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa on Tuesday Nov. 21, 2017, regarding his 2017 Fall Report. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
November 21, 2017 - 8:33 AM
OTTAWA - Auditor general Michael Ferguson has taken his first close look at the federal government's problem-plagued pay system known as Phoenix. Here are some numbers from the report:
290,000: Federal employees the government has to pay regularly.
$22 billion: Annual payroll for the federal government.
80,000: Different pay rules that guide those payments.
200: Custom additions to Phoenix to handle those 80,000 rules.
494,500: Outstanding pay issues that needed to be resolved at the end of June.
150,000: Public servants who had an outstanding pay issue at the end of June.
$520 million: Total value of the pay issues that needed to be resolved at the end of June.
$540 million: Estimated spending over three years to fix Phoenix, a number Ferguson said he expects the government to blow past.
$1.2 billion: Cost over seven years it took an Australian government agency to resolve a similar pay system problem, an example Ferguson cites specifically in his report as an example of where Canada could end up.
62: Percentage of public servants who were paid incorrectly at least once during the last fiscal year, ending in March.
News from © The Canadian Press, 2017