CFOB Newsletters

The Departmental Accounts Receivable System (DARS) Replacement Project is a major project under the SAP Centre of Expertise (COE) Directorate within Chief Financial Officer Branch (CFOB), focused on modernizing and enhancing how Canadians repay program overpayments and defaulted Canada Student Loans to the Government of Canada.

Much like our old Walkman, DARS has been steadily aging and has been struggling to adapt to our modern business environment. With over 800,000 citizen accounts within DARS reaching a balance of over $3.9 billion, a team was assembled to find and implement a new solution to help manage our social programs well into the future. The replacement of DARS is the SAP Public Sector Collections and Disbursements (PSCD) module and along with its implementation come enhanced functionality, new technologies, and improved processes.

PSCD has been specifically developed to meet the current needs of those Departments and Agencies that have high transaction volumes for mass processing, collections and case management. In other words, PSDC will provide a one-stop-shop for overpayment management, allowing information, statements and correspondence to reach millions of Canadians.

Benefits of PSCD

• Improved user experience
• Quicker overpayment recovery
• More efficient use of departmental resources
• More accurate financial reporting
• Reduce risks caused by aging technology

The Transfer

Moving almost 2 billion dollars' worth of accounts from one system to another is no small feat. In fact, cleaning up these active and inactive accounts was such a large undertaking that it required its own team and clean up strategy. For the past few years, the CFOB National Accounts Receivable team has been working hard to ensure the accuracy and validity of financial and non-financial information, determine which accounts are deemed collectable, and removing accounts deemed not collectable.

Training

There are approximately 4,500 employees at ESDC and CRA that use DARS today. DARS users began training on PSCD in February 2020, well in advance of the April 6, 2020 Go Live. PSCD encompasses e-learning and classroom courses that are aligned to the transactions users will perform in PSCD and their involvement in overpayment management. Training can be accessed on the myEMS(SAP) page.

Downtime

Since PSCD is a module of SAP, the department’s financial management system will experience some downtime in order to enhance the system, implement the new module, convert DARS legacy data and transfer interfaces with partners from DARS to SAP. This downtime affects both DARS and SAP. The specific times are listed in the table below. It is important to note that during this downtime, users will not have access to the SAP systems including Portal, GUI, BI Reports or the FIORI Launchpad.

DARS Replacement Project - Downtimes