St. John's woman loses home after Phoenix pay fiasco
CBC
A St. John's woman says she has lost everything — her home, her livelihood and stability — after years-long problems with the federal government's notorious Phoenix pay system, and has yet to receive a cent back in compensation.
Joanne Nemec Osmond, 46, started with the Canada Revenue Agency in 2006 as a contract worker. Each year, she was laid off only to be called back the following season, with the hope that one day she would become a permanent employee.
In 2017, she was offered a higher-paying position, but it came at a crippling price that would destroy her home, career and finances.
"They owe me cold, hard cash that I earned for working, but I'll never get back my credit, I'll never [get back] my home that I had to leave to my children, the change in life," Nemec Osmond said.
"They've taken years off my life."
Nemec Osmond is one of more than an estimated 200,000 federal government employees who have gone unpaid for long periods of time, were paid less than expected or have been overpaid since the Phoenix system was set up.
The troubled IBM pay system was contracted by the federal government in 2011 to replace its aging system. It came online in 2016 and there have been countless failures since, costing more than $2.4 billion as of April. A replacement system is in the works.
Shortly after the Phoenix pay system came online, Nemec Osmond said she began seeing deductions on her pay stubs in varying amounts, anywhere from tens of dollars to hundreds. When she called the compensation department to ask why, she said they couldn't tell her on which dates she was overpaid — only that she was, and as a result, was having money clawed back.
After taking a higher-paying job in 2017, the problem got worse and she began receiving paycheques for $0.
Stressed and unable to meet her mortgage payments, Nemec Osmond applied for employment insurance that same year.
She said she was yet again slighted by the federal government's faulty system.
"Phoenix issued me a record of employment that missed six months of my employment and said I did not qualify for EI," Nemec Osmond said.
"After my cheque going to zero and saying I didn't qualify, I became a squeaky wheel."
She later obtained EI after intervention by the assistant to her member of Parliament, Liberal Seamus O'Regan.
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