Photo: The Canadian Press

Auditor General Michael Ferguson

The federal government's chronic salary struggles will take more time and more dollars than the three years and $540 million projected to fix the snafu-stricken Phoenix public service pay system, the auditor general warned Tuesday — an escalating "fiasco" that the governing Liberals laid squarely at the feet of their Conservative predecessors.

Auditor Michael Ferguson even went so far as to warn that the government may be "in a similar situation" to Australia, where a comparable problem has already cost more than $1.2 billion over the last eight years and still isn't completely fixed.

Ferguson's review of the disastrous Phoenix pay system detailed just how many and how often public servants are either being overpaid and underpaid, how badly federal officials gauged the size and the scope of the problem, and how the government under-reported the number of outstanding pay problems even as issues grew.

In all, there were 150,000 employees with pay problems that needed correcting at the start of summer, and a value of over $520 million worth of mistakes.

The Liberals will provide a full and detailed cost estimate to fix the system, but not until next May, with plans to finalize by next month a preliminary road map of dozens of projects aimed at fixing Phoenix.