Public Services and Procurement Canada admits that the personal information of more than 69,000 public servants caught up in the Phoenix pay system debacle has been mistakenly emailed to the wrong people.
Problems in the electronic payroll system have caused thousands of employees to either be underpaid or overpaid for months at a time since 2016. While the government worked on addressing the system issues, human resources heads have been sending reports, which contained employees personal information, every two weeks. Earlier this month, the report containing the personal information of 69,087 public servants was accidentally emailed to the wrong federal departments.
Minister of Public Services and Procurement Anita Anand said: “Our government takes privacy concerns and the protection of personal information very seriously and it is top of mind in the work we do at PSPC,”
“We will take steps to ensure that this does not happen again and fully reevaluate the way in which personal information is stored and used.”
The news follows reports that other federal departments and agencies in Canada have mishandled personal information belonging to 144,000 Canadians over the past two years.