Phoenix Payroll System Project Report

This is project is about the phoenix payroll system. This payroll system is used by the Canadian federal government to manage the payroll for all the federal employees. This project was taken up by IBM in 2011, which was funded by the government. This payroll was previously handled by a company named Public Works, the main purpose was to replace federal governments payroll system and centralise payroll of the employees into one system. Their aim was to simplify the system and make it more efficient and automated which can cut costs and can be handled by minimum man power.

In June 2011 IBM won the contract to develop this payroll system for the federal government. Initially the budget for the project was 5.7 million Canadian dollars, but they
They complained about being underpaid, or some inconsistencies with the payment and some of them complained that they did not get it at all, which led to an outcry within employees who have been affected with the new payroll system. Federal employees’ union requested the government to scrap the new pay roll system. Despite the request, the government initiated on rolling out the system to the rest of the 67 departments. After the rollout the employees continued complaining about underpayments, miscalculations, overpayments or no payments made. To fix this problem the government opened up separate pay centres around the country to handle the situation, which costed them more. Over a hundred people were employed to run these centres smoothly. The government later announced that it is going to cost them five hundred and forty million dollars. The federal union requested the government to scrap the entire new payroll system for which the government did not agree
From the page the CA can view and modify the paying information of any employees in phoenix and carry out any administrative actions too. Some breaches were related to the coding. Custom code was added to the pages in a module used by managers, to support requirements specific to the Canadian government. There were some problems with this custom code, when certain actions taken by the mangers the custom code was bypassed and a search for all employees in the government instead of only employees from the manager organization. The fix was developed to modify the custom code so that security feature was intact. Prior to this change a quick fix was attempted which removed a feature to save search parameters prior to search employees, but this fix did not cover all the pages the managers used. This can invoke further breaches in