A by the numbers look at the federal government’s problem-plagued payroll system

OTTAWA – The federal government’s Phoenix payroll system left thousands of civil servants underpaid, overpaid or not paid at all after it went live in February 2016. Some of the numbers released Thursday:

8.9 million: Approximate number of annual pay transactions the federal government handles each year.

300,000: Number of public servants that the federal government has to pay on a regular basis.

$17 billion: Total value of all those payments processed by federal pay systems.

$78 million: Savings that Phoenix was supposed to have created in its first year of operation.

2: New temporary pay processing centres that the federal government is opening.

357,000: Approximate number of problematic pay transactions that have to be resolved.

356: Additional payroll experts the government has hired to help with the backlog.