Bureaucrat in charge of Phoenix pay system shuffled into new role

The bureaucrat who oversaw the Phoenix pay system has been shuffled into another role at Public Services and Procurement Canada.

Rosanna Di Paola, the department's associate assistantdeputy minister of the accounting, banking and compensation branch, has accepted a new role as a special adviser.

"This new role will see her focus on several important projects related to pay modernization that require extensive pay and benefits expertise," wrote departmentspokeswomanMe'shel Gulliver Blanger in an emailed statement.

• Senior official says Phoenix isn't the problem, it's how people used it
• Phoenix paysystem 'functioning as designed,' says senior federal manager

Di Paola whose involvement with the modernization of the pay system datedback to 2006 will no longer have responsibility for making key decisions about the Phoenix pay system, sources told CBC News.

Her replacement is Marc Lemieux, who most recently served as anexecutive director and acting vice-presidentat Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions, according toPublic Services and Procurement Canada.

Oct. 31 deadlineto clear backlog cases approaches

The move comes as the government's Oct. 31 deadline nearsto clear a backlog of tens of thousands of cases of public servants who have experiencedproblems with their pay since the system rolled out earlier this year.

• More than half of Phoenix pay backlog remains as Oct. 31 deadline looms
• Government accused of hiding full scope of Phoenix fiasco

During a tribunal hearing on the Phoenix pay system's problems last month, Di Paolatestifiedthe problems were due to a lack of training, not the software.

"To do it over again, I would have made training absolutely mandatory," she told the hearingin September."We underestimated the time it took people to adapt to the new technology.The learning curve just seemed to be much longer thanwe expected.

"The information is not being entered into the departmental HR system in a timely way or correct way.The second root cause we found is the processing time inMiramichi [N.B.] has been slower thanexpected."

After her testimony,Di Paola was noticeably absent from the department'snext two technical briefings on the Phoenix situation. Prior to her testimony, she had attended mostof those briefings.