Pentagon completely incapable of paying soldiers correctly

[jimmy olsen]

This level of incompetence makes the administratum of WH40k seem a bit more believable. 

15k words, so I can't possible post it here, but it's an eye opener. They can't even manage to pay the Army Chief of Staff!

http://preview.reuters.com/2013/7/9/wounded-in-battle-stiffed-by-the-pentagon

Here are some choice quotes

    A review of individuals' military pay records, government reports and other documents, along with interviews with dozens of current and former soldiers and other military personnel, confirms Aiken's case is hardly isolated. Pay errors in the military are widespread. And as Aiken and many other soldiers have found, once mistakes are detected, getting them corrected - or just explained - can test even the most persistent soldiers (see related story).

    "Too often, a soldier who has a problem with his or her pay can wait days, weeks or even months to get things sorted out," Democratic Senator Thomas Carper of Delaware, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote in an email. "This is simply unacceptable."

   Reuters found multiple examples of pay mistakes affecting active-duty personnel and discharged soldiers. Some are erroneously shortchanged on pay. Others are mistakenly overpaid and then see their earnings drastically cut as DFAS recoups the money, or, like Aiken, they are forced to pay money that was rightfully theirs.

    Precise totals on the extent and cost of these mistakes are impossible to come by, and for the very reason the errors plague the military in the first place: the Defense Department's jury-rigged network of mostly incompatible computer systems for payroll and accounting, many of them decades old, long obsolete, and unable to communicate with each other. The DFAS accounting system still uses a half-century-old computer language that is largely unable to communicate with the equally outmoded personnel management systems employed by each of the military services.

...

    This way of doing business has also proved resistant to change. A recalcitrant bureaucracy, competing priorities - war, among others - and until recently, congressional indifference have stymied any efforts to impose order. Most notable among those efforts: a project to install a new, unified pay- and personnel-management system that eventually ate more than $1 billion before the Pentagon killed it.

...

    The Pentagon's record-keeping tangle not only increases the potential for errors; it also forces DFAS to depend heavily on "manual workarounds," another source of errors. Neither the Pentagon or DFAS or the military services can specify how many workers are used to handle these tasks, but "it takes a massive amount of human effort," says Roy Wallace, an Army assistant deputy chief of staff.

    "At last count, there were 167 manual workarounds" for the 40-year-old pay system used by DFAS and all the services except the Marines, he says. As a result, staff often must transcribe information from one system onto paper, carry it to another office, and hand it off to other workers who then manually enter it into other systems – a process called "finger-gapping" that Wallace faults as a further source of errors.


...

    DFAS said pay errors are extremely rare. Based on a self-audit, it said, its accuracy for pay and calculation of benefits for military personnel in the nine months through July 2012 was 99.76 percent. The agency also said it had undergone partial audits for pay accuracy by the inspector general of the Defense Department and by the GAO.

    But a spokeswoman for the Defense Department inspector general and a senior GAO official said their respective offices hadn't audited the overall accuracy of DFAS pay in the past five years, and neither could recall any such audit ever having been conducted.

    Further, in a report issued in February this year, the Defense Department inspector general found "significant deficiencies" in DFAS's own internal auditing organization. These included failure to "exercise sufficient professional judgment," ineffective quality-control monitoring and failure to comply with required accounting standards.

    DFAS Director Teresa McKay declined to be interviewed for this article and declined to allow Reuters to interview any other DFAS personnel. Her boss, Pentagon Comptroller Hale, backed that decision. The agency accepted only written questions.

...

    When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, retired four-star general Peter Schoomaker heeded a call from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to return to active duty - as Army chief of staff, the highest military rank in the Army.

    Schoomaker returned to work, but he didn't get paid. DFAS had - correctly - stopped Schoomaker's monthly retirement checks when he resumed active duty. But its computers weren't able to restart pay for a soldier returning from retirement.

    It took months for Schoomaker to start receiving his pay, and even more to get reimbursed for the months he had been stiffed.

    In the meantime, soon after Schoomaker's return to active duty, a computer-generated letter arrived at his home, addressed to his wife and offering condolences on the general's death. DFAS's computers were programmed to assume that when a retiree was taken off the rolls, that person had died.

    The letter didn't cause any undue alarm at the Schoomaker home; the general was living there at the time. He did notice that the letter spelled his name three different ways.

    "If the Chief of Staff of the Army is treated that way," Schoomaker says, "you can imagine how a private is treated."



    Wallace, the Army assistant deputy chief of staff, says the system has "seven million lines of Cobol code that hasn't been updated" in more than a dozen years, and significant parts of the code have been "corrupted." The older it gets, the harder it is to maintain. As DFAS itself said: "As time passes, the pool of Cobol expertise dwindles."

    Further, the system is nearly impossible to update because the documentation for it - explaining how it was built, what was in it, and how it works - disappeared long ago, according to Kevin McGraw. He retired recently after working 30 years in DFAS's Cleveland office, most of that time responsible for maintaining the part of DJMS that handles Navy pay. "It's hard to make a change to a program if you don't know what's in there," McGraw says.
...

    DFAS records show that after the Army demoted Pfleider in February 2008, the Oregon National Guard mistakenly promoted him. After confused communications between the Army and the National Guard, the Guard then demoted and re-promoted Pfleider several times. Because Pfleider was on active duty, the Guard had no legal authority to change Pfleider's rank or pay; only the Army did. DFAS erroneously accepted the promotions and demotions the Guard reported, raising and lowering Pfleider's salary accordingly.

...

    DFAS spokesman LaRock said the agency has "no part in designating a soldier as a wounded warrior." That responsibility, he said, rests with the medical department of the relevant military service - in Aiken's case, the Army Medical Department.

    Margaret Tippy, a spokeswoman for the Army Medical Department, said she could "say with certainty" that her department doesn't have primary responsibility for designating a soldier as a wounded warrior.

    Earlier statements by Pentagon officials indicate it is DFAS's job to designate wounded warriors. In congressional testimony in 2006, then-DFAS Director Gaddy said the agency had developed a "Wounded in Action Pay Management Program," and that "we identify and monitor all battle-injured and non-battle-injured soldiers who have served in a combat zone from October 7, 2001, to the present." At the same hearing, then-Pentagon Comptroller J. David Patterson said oversight of wounded warriors was the responsibility of his office and DFAS.

[Admiral Yi]

"Too often, a soldier who has a problem with his or her pay can wait days, weeks or even months to get things sorted out," Democratic Senator Thomas Carper of Delaware, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote in an email. "This is simply unacceptable."

ENTIRE DAYS??

[Phillip V]

Pentagon owes me $10k-$15k from 2012.

[jimmy olsen]

"Too often, a soldier who has a problem with his or her pay can wait days, weeks or even months to get things sorted out," Democratic Senator Thomas Carper of Delaware, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote in an email. "This is simply unacceptable."

ENTIRE DAYS??

I think it's the weeks and the months are the more damning bit.

[derspiess]

Pentagon owes me $10k-$15k from 2012.

Time for a bonus march?

[Admiral Yi]

Question for the various Languish grunts, swabbies, and PC pilots: do you get taxed on your allowances, such as clothes and housing?

[11B4V]

Question for the various Languish grunts, swabbies, and PC pilots: do you get taxed on your allowances, such as clothes and housing?

I want to say yes, but cant remember. Siege might know.

BTW Tim this is nothing new by any means.

[Tonitrus]

Question for the various Languish grunts, swabbies, and PC pilots: do you get taxed on your allowances, such as clothes and housing?

Generally no.  We get a housing allowance (amount based on location), a subsistence allowance (roughly $350-400/month), both of which are tax free.  Not sure about the annual clothing allowance.

Siege has been overseas enough that all his pay over there would have been tax-free...including the imminent danger/hostile fire pay.