Faces of Phoenix: 'How can you ask someone to serve their country when you can't even pay...

[guest]

“How can you ask someone to serve their country, even in something as, quote-unquote, menial as a bureaucratic position — red tape and collections and taxes — how can you ask anybody to serve their country when you can’t even pay them?”
— Jillian Graham.
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Every other Monday morning, Jillian Graham plays a game she calls Russian roulette.

The 36-year-old Canada Revenue Agency tax collector arrives at her office in Prince George, B.C., and goes online to see how big or small her paycheque will be that week. It should be somewhere around $1,500, she says, but that’s rarely the case. Sometimes it’s too much, like the $1,742 she received last November. On other occasions, it’s woefully short — her pay immediately before Christmas last year, for example, was only $214, she says.

Graham suffers anxiety/depression, and her bi-weekly adventures in that circle of hell known as the Phoenix pay system do nothing to assuage her uneasiness.

“It will determine what my mood is going to be like for the next two weeks,” she says, “which is very important for me because some days I can’t get out of bed. That’s what depression and anxiety does.

Her entire family has been affected by her Phoenix problems, she adds. “I have a dog and a cat and my sister helps me pay for their food right now because I can’t. I’ve borrowed something like $15,000 from my family to get food, to get medication, to get tires for my car, to pay my rent.”

She says she stays awake late into the night worrying about how she’ll make it to her next paycheque, and blames at least some of her grey hairs on Phoenix. She’s learned to make one-dollar bags of pasta last as long as possible. She’s considered giving up her car. When she visits her parents, they send her home with packages of meat.

“And let’s not start on my credit record,” she says, “because I’ve missed payments. I’ve had to decide what to pay this time and what not to pay, so my credit record is screwed. I was hoping to buy a house by 2020, but it’s going to be 2023 at least, because I need five years at least to get my credit history improved.

“I’m already on pretty much the maximum dosage of my medication. I should be living here in this little haze of happiness. I should be like an automaton. But I’m not.”

Exasperated, she sent a lengthy handwritten letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, describing her situation.

“I’m done,” she explained. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Graham has multiple issues that affect her pay, difficulties that sometimes exacerbate one another, like a pinball game in multi-ball mode. She describes herself as a “poster child” for what Phoenix can and cannot do. Handling leave without pay is one of the things, she says, it is seemingly not designed to do.

She had just returned from a five-month medical leave in October 2016. Her four-day work week included 4½ hours of unpaid leave, which, between December 2016 and August 2017, Phoenix wasn’t processing properly, usually generating overpayments.

In March 2017, she went on a four-week unpaid leave related to her anxiety. Her pay was only stopped when she returned from leave, and then only for two weeks. She had applied through EI for medical benefits for the four weeks, for which she needed to produce her Record of Employment, or ROE, which employers are required to produce within five calendar days of the end of the first pay period affected. CRA issued hers at the end of May.

Graham got her MP involved, printed her pay stubs from the previous six months, and had Service Canada create a manual ROE, which indicated that she had worked more than the 600 hours required for $1,600 in medical benefits. The ROE she finally received from CRA at the end of May confirmed this.

Meanwhile, and almost unrelated, her Union of Taxation Employees had agreed in October 2016 to relinquish its right to voluntary severance, to be replaced instead by a buyout. Having worked for about a decade, Graham was entitled to roughly $12,000, which she requested at the end of January.

“Instead, I got about $4,000. They went through my account and said, ‘Oh, all these little $250 overpayments’ from my 4-1/2 hours every week, ‘that we never clawed back. We have to claw them back now.’”

“Fine,” she thought, “just get it all sorted.” She took the $4,000 and went to Disney World.

In August, CRA issued her a new ROE that indicated she’d only worked 590 hours, not 600. The $1,600 in medical benefits would have to be returned. She asked Service Canada to reconsider, but her request was denied. She’s had to get an emergency salary advance just to make ends meet, and says there are still clawbacks on her pay stubs that she doesn’t recognize. As things stand, she’s not sure if she owes money or is owed.

“I don’t even know if they’ve screwed up my pay. I don’t know. I live in constant fear every time I think I’ve sat down and reconciled it, I’m wrong. And how can you fight it? They push a button and they get a report, and I’m like, ‘Well, it’s based off my time sheets. I guess I’ll just go with what Goliath says, because I’m not exactly David here; I don’t have the story behind me. I’m just that little person trying to do her job.”

She estimates she’s spent two hours a week for the past 18 months, or roughly 150 hours, trying to sort it all out. If you add in the loss of morale, she guesses her productivity is down by about 10 hours a week. And she has little hope that anything is going to change anytime soon.

“I’m at the point where I just don’t think it’s going to get fixed. I have no faith in it. I love my job and I’ve always advocated for people to work in the federal government, but right now I tell them, ‘It’s still a great place to work; just make sure you’ve got money, just in case you’re one of the ones.’

“I’m theoretically 19 years from retirement,” she adds. “I’m hoping that maybe they’ll have it sorted out by then.”

(A spokesperson for Public Services, which is responsible for Phoenix, said privacy legislation prevents the department from discussing details of the employment and pay of individual federal government employees.)

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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