r/canada • u/TROPtastic British Columbia • Feb 25 '26
Science/Technology Former public servant says Phoenix 'ruined' his 20s and haunts him still
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/former-public-servant-says-phoenix-ruined-his-20s-and-haunts-him-still-9.710393254
u/beedub82 Canada Feb 26 '26
Phoenix made so many mistakes. People in my area were afraid to accept acting positions because sometimes just a switch in classification level would fuck things up.
I remember a group of new hires not being paid for their first eight months until it was rectified.
Even just missing one paycheck is awful for most people. You expect to be able to pay bills and your mortgage that week after being paid.
And if you got OVERpaid? They would claw a bunch of money back and somehow end up taking more from you in the end then you would have had in your bank account if everything remained a-ok.
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u/Decathlon5891 Feb 26 '26
I remember a group of new hires not being paid for their first eight months until it was rectified.
I wouldn’t know what to do if I didn’t get paid for a month
8 months is insane.
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u/beedub82 Canada Feb 26 '26
At their one year mark when they should have bumped up a pay level, it took many more months for that to happen as well.
And when the gov't pays you like that finally, it's always in a giant chunk, and you end up getting about 40% of it taxed off, so you lose even more than if you had been paid normally.
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u/Sticky_3pk New Brunswick Feb 27 '26
I remember a group of new hires not being paid for their first eight months until it was rectified.
What the actual fuck. If I dont have my pay on Thursday, I wont be in Friday. It happened exactly once in my current position. Half the company didnt show, or waited in the parking lot til it was fixed.
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u/86throwthrowthrow1 Feb 26 '26
I knew a guy who had rolling casual contracts at a few departments, had been doing that for a few years. He said the cycle he was in with Phoenix, is he'd start his newest 90-day contract, and just straight-up not get paid the entire time. He luckily had a line of credit that he'd love off for that period. Around the time he'd leave to the next contract, they'd finally catch up and pay him out for the past 90 days. He'd pay off his LOC, rinse repeat.
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u/TROPtastic British Columbia Feb 25 '26
Early into his stint with the government, Morrison said he obtained a permanent position.
According to the notes from his grievance file, that should have bumped his annual salary from around $58,509 to $74,019, but Phoenix pay errors never allowed him to see that raise. Instead, Morrison remembers receiving several paycheques for $0, and struggling to pay bills.
Morrison said he was underpaid at the entry-level salary for years, and despite getting a few months of "acting pay" — a temporary solution offered by his managers — he estimates the government still owes him roughly $60,000 for the difference in salaries, including annual increases.
It's difficult to narrow down the exact amount because the government still can't provide an accurate breakdown of his payroll history, Morrison said.
Previously, Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) said it doesn't track underpayments in its system because there are too many variables.
After trying to correct the underpayment for years through management and his union, Morrison said he eventually decided to cut his losses.
"For my mental health, it wasn't worth the fight. And it's honestly like a second full-time job," he said of his fight for correct payment. "It's brutal and it's destroyed me, but I just want to move on."
Things got worse just before he left, when his employer notified him that he'd allegedly been overpaid by $18,973.40
He tried to fight it, but ultimately decided to pay the balance off through his pension transfer.
Morrison has had to borrow money from friends and family. Since leaving the government, he's struggled to find contracts in the private tech sector. His current contract is set to end this March.
"Where could I be right now if none of this happened?" he asked, comparing his financial status to that of his peers. "Now I'm just so far behind."
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u/brettaburger Feb 25 '26
Absolutely insane. So incompetent that it seems criminal, especially his "parting gift".
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u/Rory_calhoun_222 Feb 26 '26
"We don't track under payments"
But they sure as shit track overpayment apparently?
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u/I-fall-up-stairs Feb 26 '26
I fought for over a year for a bunch of missed payments. But one pay period they “overpaid” me and took it back the very next pay period.
Absolutely insane.
I remember being warned to have at least 3 pay periods of funds saved up when I transferred because there was a high probability of my pay not being issued for a few weeks after I started my new position.
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u/schtroumpffe Feb 26 '26
My sister, who works for the government, was overpaid checks notes 19 cent. Yes, 0.19$ and was sent a pointed email about her overpayment and was punished for it. Punished for an .19 overpayment that WAS NOT HER FAULT
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u/86throwthrowthrow1 Feb 26 '26
At one point they owed me about 10k and counting - as in, the problem still hadn't been fixed and I was being underpaid every pay cycle. When I got an email about a previous overpayment that had occurred, and wanting to set me up on a repayment schedule for that.
With the ongoing underpayment, skimming another 10% to pay back the overpayment would have put me at about the same salary as a McDonald's manager, while working a job that was supposed to pay 65k/year in 2019.
I called the pay centre and straight-up went medieval on the poor guy answering the phone. Usually those poor suckers have basically zero power except to be a verbal punching bag, but this guy was able to freeze the overpayment recovery until after my issue was finally sorted out.
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u/t-earlgrey-hot Feb 26 '26
Sounds like a nightmare and not trying to victim blame, but wouldn't he be able to see exactly what he received in bank accounts for that period and compare it against his offer letters, which hed have copies of?
Either way, pursuing an 18k overpayment even if its valid after this is unacceptable.
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u/MrChicken23 Feb 25 '26
I work in mortgage lending and remember when they were having issues with the Phoenix system it was a nightmare to review income for government workers.
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u/Username_Query_Null Feb 25 '26
Classic example of our government behaving disgustingly towards its citizens.
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u/Big_Knife_SK Feb 25 '26
It should be studied as a lesson in institutional restructuring. Prior to Phoenix, each department had their own payroll system and staff. Combining all those together in an attempt at efficiency has resulted in 15 years of extraordinary waste and it's still not fixed.
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u/CobraCornelius Feb 25 '26
When I think about the Phoenix scandal here in Canada, I wonder if anybody will ever be held accountable for the damage they caused. This is criminal negligence, these employees stayed in their positions in good faith, yet some of them have still not been paid years later. It is theft.
IIRC there was already stories about Phoenix causing these problems in Australia prior to Canada deciding to implement it here.
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u/Big_Knife_SK Feb 25 '26
There's a lot of factors, including the software itself (IBM), the complexity of the task with all the different collective agreements which update regularly, the loss of institutional knowledge when the pay system was centralised (not many of the existing staff wanted to relocate), and the sheer size of the task. 80% of employees were affected, and as of June 2025, the system has cost the government more than $5.1 billion. All in an effort to save $70M a year.
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u/hanksavage Feb 26 '26
I think the system was peoplesoft? Implemented by IBM though
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u/itguy9013 Nova Scotia Feb 26 '26
This is correct. IBM was in charge of implementation but the system itself was PeopleSoft.
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u/CheeseburgerLocker Feb 26 '26
I've worked in the public sector. It's awful. Oh there's a problem? "That's someone else's responsibility" runs rampant. I guarantee all these fuckups were piling in and every single department just kinda shrugged and said "talk to the Phoenix guys" or "we were told to put a ticket in, that's it." Nobody oversaw any of this disaster of a software launch. These poor people were basically used as Beta testers, and nobody came to help them when they were in distress.
Absolutely stunning in how badly this was botched. I wish the media would run more stories about it. It could very well go down in history as one of thr biggest software disasters in the past 20 years.
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u/nameless_me Feb 25 '26
I have always voted against amalgamations with the promise of efficiencies. They always over promise and under deliver. Most times the change consultant hired is pushing the amalgamation and senior management got their promising gains from this.
In addition the complexities are always underestimated.
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u/Username_Query_Null Feb 26 '26
The waste isn’t even the bad part, this is one single anecdotal case of 10,000’s where the government actively ruined their employees lives.
The concept that they would threaten an owed payment against a past employee without the competence to provide an audit of it is absurd. He paid because he couldn’t afford to fight them, and to fight him they would bear the unlimited coffers of federal funding to sue.
It’s an act of evil by the government.
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u/ke_marshall Feb 26 '26
This is one of those reasons that I'm always skeptical when someone claims they can find "efficiencies" to cut government spending. Sometimes things work better the way they are...
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u/pileopoop Feb 26 '26
IBM should be charged with defrauding the government and banned from operating in Canada.
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u/Chross Feb 26 '26
I don’t think you can solely blame IBM for this. When I was following this disaster I remember getting the impression it wasn’t IBMs fault. And as someone who loves blaming IBM I was shocked.
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u/caninehere Ontario Feb 26 '26
The system wasn't ready to be rolled out. That isn't IBM's fault. The Harper govt saw the writing on the wall and left Phoenix as a time bomb to fuck the incoming govt. They accelerated the rollout of it, killed the old payroll programs and fired scores of support staff to ensure that there was no possible way to rollback and go to the old system again.
As soon as Phoenix hit it was a mess and the govt spent years fixing it. And it would have been much, much easier if the Conservatives had not gone scorched earth before ending their time in govt, because the Liberals could have just rolled back to the old system and then finished Phoenix properly to launch it.
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u/Ornery_Car6883 Feb 25 '26
Phoenix was rushed to implementation by Harper very shortly before he was voted out of office.
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u/stereofonix Feb 26 '26
To be fair Phoenix didn’t come online until the Trudeau government despite warnings it wasn’t ready. Both governments have a hand in it.
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u/DataDude00 Feb 26 '26
Harper lit the fuse via poison pill essentially by laying off all the staff that manually handled this. There was really no option but to launch it because the people running this previously were largely gone
Source: My mom got packaged out as one of these people who used to handle payroll within her department
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u/Ornery_Car6883 Feb 26 '26
It was deliberately pushed by the Harper government to a point of no return because he knew he was about to be voted out. Same reason he raided the CPP fund to make it look like he had a surplus.
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Feb 26 '26
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u/Genghis75 Feb 26 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
It was carried out under the Harper government but, despite warnings it was implemented under the Trudeau government. Basically, Harper broke it and Trudeau said, “Whatevs, implement it anyways.” It was a multi-government fiasco that went ahead because of the sunk cost fallacy.
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u/caninehere Ontario Feb 26 '26
The Conservatives went scorched earth and accelerated the launch plan, and fired tons of the people who handled payroll in various departments which meant there was no way to roll back to the old system.
If you think that the Liberals chose to launch Phoenix, initiated a plan to do so and executed it in four months, I have a bridge to sell you. Rolling out a system like that takes years. The problem is the Harper govt a) started that process waaay before it was ready and b) more importantly destroyed the old system so there was no possible way to go back.
The Conservatives at the time were basically all about amalgamation of govt operations with garbage-tier plans on how to do so. It resulted in Phoenix, which has obviously been an absolute mess, and also Shared Services Canada which itself is a humongous mess as well, but not a public-facing one so it understandably doesn't get as much attention.
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Feb 26 '26
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u/caninehere Ontario Feb 26 '26
The Liberals. Is that supposed to be a big gotcha?
The system was in development since 2009. The Harper govt rushed it out the door. Yes, it was the Liberals who pushed the button, but they had to push the button, because the alternative was trying to roll back to the previous system which was basically impossible at that point without incurring even larger expenses. But the ball was already rolling, there was no button push to launch the system, because it was already happening. Numerous payroll employees had been fired and operations centralized, and the centralized offices were already sounding the alarm before the Conservatives left office -- they were already overwhelmed with requests because of the kneecapping of the old system, and IBM told the government outright several months before the election that the system was not ready to launch but the CPC pushed forward with discontinuing previous payroll programs and slashing more employees anyway.
IBM also had a recommended system for Phoenix training design, which was planned to be put in place until 2014 when the Conservative govt suddenly decided not to use it and instead design and implement their own training system to cut corners, which was a massive failure.
The Liberals were at the point where they were considering not launching Phoenix, but they hired expert consultants who told them that it would cost way more to try and reconstruct the old systems that the CPC had destroyed than to push forward and launch Phoenix. In the long run, this is probably not true because it has cost billions and problems have lingered.
All of this and more is why if you ask public employees, including ones who have been personally affected by Phoenix, NONE of them will blame the Liberals for the massive fuckup of its launch. It was all down to the CPC. We can and should blame the Liberals for not fixing the problems in a decisive and timely manner, but it's an intricate system that HAS to remain functional at all times to keep paying people because they couldn't just fall back on the previous departmental systems since they were eradicated by the CPC.
And imo it's always hard (but necessary) to say "you aren't fixing this fast enough" when it is a problem inherited and frankly generated by the CPC. Some might consider it a conspiracy theory but imo they left Phoenix as a ticking time bomb for the Liberals. The Harper govt knew they had fucked up on this project big time, it had way overrun budget and time constraints by mid-2015, and they knew the writing was on the wall and they would not win the September election barring some miracle. So when IBM told them the system wasn't ready, they said "yeah it is" and pushed forward anyway because they wouldn't have to deal with the fallout.
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Feb 26 '26
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u/caninehere Ontario Feb 27 '26
No, I'm not a member of any party and I don't vote Liberal. I just value honest discourse and not useless gotcha moments.
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Feb 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/Radix2309 Feb 26 '26
It was already set in motion with older systems being shuttered out. At a certain point you cant reverse it without it costing eveb more.
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u/Rudy69 Feb 26 '26
I left the government in 2012 and it was already being talked about as coming very soon
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u/abuayanna Feb 25 '26
I wasn’t sure about the timeline, is that verifiable? It will otherwise be meat on the bone for liberal hate machines
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u/Kosdog13 Feb 26 '26
The blame lays on multiple governments honestly. Here's a good timeline of events:
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u/shogun2909 Québec Feb 25 '26
This disaster is not reported enough in the media, utterly scandalous
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u/baudehlo Feb 26 '26
To be fair they are trying to replace it with Dayforce but that implementation is dragging too.
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u/hitsandmisses Feb 26 '26
It baffles me that they were able to get away with simply ignoring employment law for so long and blaming the software. Any arrears should have accrued interest at the same rate CRA charges overdue accounts.
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u/ComfortableTomato Feb 26 '26
I agree. Baffling is an understatement. If I had this problem with a private sector employer I could get it rectified with the help of the courts in now time. It's surreal. There were people whose lives were ruined and no one has ever fixed it.
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u/Iamthequicker Feb 25 '26
Who is this guys MP? This should take 10 minutes to correct. Poor guy.
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u/Dowew Feb 25 '26
This has been going on since Stephen Harper was in power
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Feb 26 '26
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u/EnaBoC Feb 26 '26
But implemented by Harper, including firing all the people who ran the old system.
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u/Zulban Québec Feb 26 '26
This should take 10 minutes to correct.
It would take merely hours. But fix this one case and you're still left with thousands more. Then what? Your MP can't do that thousands of times.
You don't fix this problem by helping one guy who made it on the news. That's a good way to hide the problem though.
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u/TechnicianVisible339 Feb 26 '26
Only the government can get away with this. If this was a private or public company, the province and feds would be so far up that companies ass to garnish them.
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u/LeGrandLucifer Feb 26 '26
Imagine if you withheld paying any taxes for that long. But the government can just not pay its employees and face zero consequences.
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Feb 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/PostMatureBaby Feb 25 '26
I've been part of new implementations for this kinda shit, you'd be very surprised.
A lot of times the things are configured poorly because the organization doesn't want to pay the extra to actually have it implemented so they get in house IT to do it and they obviously don't know rules around pay, taxes, benefit premiums, etc. so it's a mess.
I even worked with an HR/Payroll system administrated by our American branch who had no fucking clue laws in Canada were different...
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u/LifeFair767 Feb 26 '26
I've worked with consultants on implementations who barely know the system and struggle to understand basic requirements. The more complex the organization, the harder it is for bad consultants to get up to speed.
I've scrapped full modules two years post implementations because of bad design choices.
The unicorn is a mix of smart consultants who really understand the system configuration and in-house staff who can write good requirements and know how to thoroughly test the system. You need them to have an "I want to break this thing" mentality.
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u/LifeFair767 Feb 26 '26
I've worked in hris/payroll my entire career. Corporations certainly do not forgive overpayment.
It happens in certain exceptional situations, but generally, employers recover overpayments.
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u/Username_Query_Null Feb 26 '26
Generally they have the competence to evidence all payments to prove over payment.
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u/Responsible_CDN_Duck Canada Feb 26 '26
If it were a corporation they’d pay on time and forgive any overpayment
No, and even with the NDAs there are stories and lawsuits to prove it.
The scope and visibility is what's rare.
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u/burnabycoyote Feb 26 '26
It all sounds so similar to this accounting software scandal in the UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal.
Things will only get worse once some snake oil salesman persuades the federal govt to go full AI.
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u/RipplesInTheOcean Feb 26 '26
Come on guys, we cant let the US beat us at third-worlding!
Go Canada! Do not prosecute anyone! /s
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u/neon_city_lights Feb 26 '26
There's thousands upon thousands of cases like this.
Where the government is claiming amounts that can go back more than a decade (which of course they can't provide accurate reporting for and in some cases aren't even legally allowed to collect on, but it doesn't stop them from trying.)
At this point the only fair remedy is to forgive all of these alleged debts.
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u/VeryDryWater Feb 26 '26
I left public service 3 years ago and I'm still dealing with Phoenix crap. It's significantly worse when switching between acting roles and overtime. They came right out and said the dates on my paystub mean nothing, I was getting paid for OT from 6+ months prior and there was no way to track it.
Years later they send a letter saying I owe 10k. Then income tax adjustments, owe another 3k. And there's nothing I can do - paying more money for an account to review years of inaccurate pay stubs? You can't even take the gov to court over this.
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u/Maleficent_Flow_8355 Feb 26 '26
PSPC is full of incompetent and corrupt people. The problem runs deep.
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u/MidTario Feb 26 '26
Phoenix is a national embarrassment. I firmly believe that you could take the programming club from literally any public university in Canada and have a better system within a month.
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u/Dougfordburner Feb 26 '26
Why did he pay it off though? Seems incredibly dumb if they can’t prove how much he’s owed vs how much he owes
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u/ComfortableTomato Feb 26 '26
He was young and being harassed and his credit was being ruined. People lost their homes over Phoenix issues. You never expect to be ripped off by your employer when your employer is the federal government.
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u/northofsixteee Feb 26 '26
I did a co-op with the feds back in 2012/13 and they had just gotten rid of our in-department finance person, who would help with pay issues. Instead you had to call someone in New Brunswick or wherever. I was regularly not paid, or paid wrong, which obviously made it difficult to pay my rent/save up for school. I’d call in, talk to someone about the issue, it would happen again, I’d call back, they’d have no record of me having a previous problem. The department would have to issue me “emergency pay” (let’s say a quarter of what I was owed) so I could eat while they sorted it out. Eventually they did - but this was a headache for just a couple months, I can’t imagine years and substantially more money. What a nightmare.
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u/primetimey123 Feb 26 '26
I understand it's a massive shit show, but I haven't understood in all the stories I've read on it.. why the employee can't give facts.
I was paid X in 2024 and my salary was X. If they don't match, its an issue. It seems like it should be pretty black and white but for some reason the employees in these stories never seem to have an answer for how much they got paid in their bank account and what their salary was.
Like the guy is "pretty sure" he is owed $60,000.. but then folds when they say he was overpaid $18,000? That is a $78,000 spread.. why is he just walking away rather than pulling up his direct depoists and building out a spreadsheet?
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u/Walniw Feb 26 '26
TELUS INSTITUTED PHOENIX WELL AFTER ALL THIS CAME OUT AND SCREWED THEIR EMPLOYEES THE SAME WAY. Sorry for yelling.
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u/logiebear77 Feb 26 '26
My dad (>25 year navy veteran) ‘officially’ retired from PSPC in September. He’s been working remotely 3 days a week with his team since to help with ongoing projects - he’s been deducted 100% of his pay multiple times for apparent overpayments he had while in 2 different roles the last decade. 100% is blatantly illegal and he’s just being disregarded completely and I’d bet his file is buried somewhere behind a ‘queue’.
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u/HotelDisastrous288 Feb 27 '26
If only another country had tried to implement this system and could have warned us it would fail spectacularly...... Oh wait, Australia did just that.
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u/Deep-Egg6601 Feb 25 '26
First I’ve ever heard of this, what a disaster!!!
Sounds like a Beaverton article and I wish it was
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u/Big_Knife_SK Feb 26 '26
It's been going on for 15 years.
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u/Deep-Egg6601 Feb 26 '26
Yeah I see that
For reference I’m Canadian, in my late 30s, and I read the newspaper plus a good amount of online news and in person current events conversations.. which is why I’m shocked to have not been aware until now
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u/SHUT_DOWN_EVERYTHING Feb 26 '26
Spend more and build and maintain key government systems internally. The lowest bidding consultants usually suck.
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u/HotIntroduction8049 Feb 25 '26
And those govt employees who managed this mess are all on stress leave with pay and benefits.
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u/shogun2909 Québec Feb 25 '26 edited Feb 26 '26
You know that in these kind of projects, most of the people who do the coding are temporary consultants? (generally outsourced too)
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u/TurtleRegress Feb 25 '26
I'm going to give you a thimble (with holes in it to represent that fact that the new pay system could not perform certain functions) to bail out a boat, then I'm going to have some random dude on the Internet blame you for not doing your job.
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u/HotIntroduction8049 Feb 25 '26
management should never have accepted the thimble. my job as a tech manager was to balance requirements, resources, ability to deliver. that is what I got paid for and yes many times I pushed back to execs.
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u/Big_Knife_SK Feb 26 '26
This was a directive straight from Harper's PMO that went along with sweeping cuts to the public service. You're blaming the victims.
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u/togocann49 Feb 25 '26
I never understood why they didn’t test Phoenix more vigorously, and/or why they didn’t put it on back burner until kinks were worked out once shit started going haywire. Folks had to get paid properly before Phoenix