Does the Phoenix payroll fiasco ring any bells?  It was a payroll processing system for Canadian federal government employees, first introduced in 2009 as part of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s “Transformation of Pay Administration Initiative” intended to replace Canada’s 40-year old system with a new cost-saving automated off-the-shelf commercial system.  It was provided by IBM in 2011 and run by Public Services and Procurement Canada.  Only problem was, it didn’t work right, and by 2018 had caused problems to close to 80% of the federal public service employees through underpayments, over-payments and non-payments.  The Auditor General’s office called it “an incomprehensible failure of project management and oversight” that, instead of saving a planned $70 million per year, the cost to taxpayers to fix the problems could reach over$2 Billion by 2023.  Another company won a new contract last year and the “Next Generation HR and Pay Joint Union Management Committee” was set up to simplify the pay rules for public servants.   I was going to get into Saskatchewan’s provincial “Administrative Information Management System” meant to replace 80 existing systems and created to manage payroll as well as other components of our health-care system, BUT, it was taken down November 4th due to a number of glitches.  We’re told it will be back up and running after they figure out what went wrong.  Governments don’t seem very adept at technology but, hey, it’s not as if its their own money they’re spending. They are pretty good at coming up with fancy names for things. 

That’s Coffeetalk.  I’m Vic Dubois.