Madam Chair and members of the committee, my name is Dan Danagher. I'm the executive director of labour relations and compensation operations at the Treasury Board Secretariat. It is an honour to be here today to discuss this issue and to focus on progress we're making in this arena, particularly on issues that have previously been the subject of this committee's concerns.
I'm pleased to underscore that since this past summer TBS is now monitoring departments' pay administration performance on a regular basis, and it is following progress and improvements where they are most needed. This past summer we surveyed departments in the core public administration. Between this survey and statistics from the pay system, our analysis demonstrated the extent of the challenge. Through dialogue we are having with departments and the sharing of best practices, we have identified, and we are pursuing, workable solutions.
It is important to stress that there has been no suggestion of lateness in the regular biweekly paycheques. The roughly 190,000 employees of the core public administration continue to receive their regular pay in a timely manner. However, the survey did benchmark the existing standard for timeliness for newly hired and departing employees and demonstrated that 66% of organizations were within the standards; a further 11% exceeded that average by in excess of one week; and roughly 23%, on average, were more than two weeks later than standards.
These survey results informed our dialogue with departments, who also provided information on their backlog for the processing of new hires, promotion, acting appointments, overtime payments, and the type of service delivery structure used at the time. All organizations have since adopted action plans to eliminate backlogs, where they existed, and to improve future performance in this area. They are all aware that TBS will conduct future surveys and continue to monitor performance in this area.
In fact, just two weeks ago we launched our second survey of departments, and we expect the analysis to be completed in February 2008. As this survey will be the first to demonstrate the impact of actions taken by departments to tackle the challenges previously raised by this committee, we suggest that the committee be sent a copy of this report at that time. The focus of this work is progress and action, and we are convinced that February's report will show that both have been achieved.
We are fortunately building on a pay administration community of talented, resourceful, and dedicated employees. We have seen strong evidence that departments have taken this matter extremely seriously. They have adopted immediate actions to address the short-term challenges by allocating the resources to clear up backlogs; recruiting new trainees into the communities; hiring coaches and team leaders to quickly increase capacity; increasing the automation of tools and process, where possible, in the short-term; and by restructuring the workload as appropriate.
I am joined by my colleague Diane Lorenzato, the assistant deputy minister of PWGSC's human resources branch, who will provide the committee with the types of actions that are being taken to resolve the issues that have been raised here.