This appeared a few days ago:
80,000 people suffer pay crisis in Canada after IBM system debacle
By freelance correspondent Susan Delacourt in Ottawa
September 1, 2016
No-one in Canada can accuse public servants of being overpaid these days.
Key points:
- The crisis affects 80,000 employees or almost one third of Canada's federal public servants
- IBM provided the payroll system for Queensland Health, and the severs for Australia's census
- Bureaucrat responsible says 'the system is working'
Thanks to a massive breakdown of the Federal Government's new, privatised pay system, tens of thousands of Canadian public servants have been going weeks, even months with reduced pay — or in many cases, no pay at all.
It is a crisis on a huge scale for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's new Government, and the cause of thousands of crises on an individual level, with people forced to borrow money or max out their credit cards to make ends meet.
In Ottawa, the nation's capital, local radio stations have featured daily reports from public servants grappling with serious financial hardship: a cancer survivor who had not been paid since returning to work from her treatments; a young mother forced to quit her job because she could not afford to keep paying for child care without a salary.
"It's an unacceptable situation," Mr Trudeau has admitted, but the mess may not be sorted out until the end of October, at the earliest.
The story may ring eerily familiar to Australians after the recent census debacle: an IBM program, brought in to do a government job, collapsing in the face of its monumental new task.
It mirrors an earlier spectacular failure in Queensland, when IBM was contracted in 2007 to implement the government pay-roll system.
Thousands of health workers suffered underpayment or no payment, and the cost to taxpayers is in the realm of $AU1.2 billion.
In Canada's case, the program is called Phoenix, but unlike its mythical namesake, it has not yet been able to rise above the flames of the controversy it has created.
At first, reports of the payroll problems were sporadic and isolated.
The Government switched over to Phoenix in early 2016, not long after Mr Trudeau assumed power late last year, and initially the problems were believed to be minor adjustment issues.
But by July, the Government announced that 80,000 employees were affected by the Phoenix meltdown — that is almost one third of the 300,000 federal public servants in the country.
Lots more is found here:
Who was it who said that history does not repeat but often rhymes! What a classic rhyming repeat! I hope this get sorted out more quickly that the issues were in Queensland!
David.
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