Wounded troops: Pay mistakes add to hardship
"The service has no choice, they have to collect" the overpayment, says Cindy Williams, a military personnel systems expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But for people living month to month, it is very difficult for families to give the money back."
That's the complaint from Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson, who was paralyzed from the waist down in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq. He was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center and then to a veterans' hospital in Richmond. While Simpson was in the Richmond hospital, his pay was suddenly reduced, then cut off altogether. One month they paid him $472, the next month nothing, and then he received a check for $870. It turned out the Army had docked his paycheck because he had been overpaid by several thousand dollars—since he was no longer overseas. But Simpson's wife and children were still living in Germany, where Simpson had been based, and his injuries were adding to their bills—meaning he had already spent the "extra" money. Simpson, now retired, feels he had earned the money the government took back. "I returned injured," Simpson says. "I wasn't on vacation. I was still fighting the same war. Its just that I wasn't in Iraq; I was fighting for my life."
Congressional hearings in February highlighted pay problems encountered by National Guard troops and reservists, who deal with an even more labyrinthine pay system since they move on and off active-duty status.
"Soldiers are dropped from one system and not picked up by another and caught in between," says Gayle Fischer, assistant director of the forensic audits and special investigations at the gao. "Just researching and tracking one soldier's specific pay problem is difficult and extremely time consuming."
Debt collectors. The GAO is currently investigating cases where wounded soldiers were referred to collection agencies for Army-related debts. Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Kelly's right leg was blown off two years ago when a bomb exploded near his convoy on a highway outside Baghdad. When he retired in August 2004, the Army owed him reimbursement money for travel expenses and vacation time. He was shocked then, in January, when he received a letter from the Defense Department threatening to report him to a collection agency for a $2,232 debt.
As is turned out, the Army erroneously credited Kelly, an Army reservist, with two weeks of active-duty service months after he'd left the service. It took Kelly several months, and a few calls to Congress, to clear his credit history, but his dispute with the Army over the debt continues. "The most stressful part of getting your leg blown off isn't losing your leg," he says. "It's all the bureaucracy that you have to go through afterwards."
Part of the problem is that the Army pay stub is amazingly complicated to read, and advance warning that pay will be docked is anything but clearly presented. "I don't know a solution to the whole problem short of revamping the entire finance system, but in the meantime an easy fix is to make soldier's leave and earnings statements easier to read," says Jeremy Chwat, national policy director for the Wounded Warrior Project, a non-profit veterans advocacy group. For his part, Hurst, now a law student at George Washington University, argues that Congress needs to step in to simplify the pay and bonus system. "These soldiers ... have been let down," he says, "and they deserve better."
Army officials say that Hurst's report is an objective and largely accurate account of pay problems. But they also say they've begun to fix the system. "I think we have made a lot of improvement," said Eric Reid, director of the U.S. Army Finance Command. "Is it foolproof? No." The Army is working aggressively to forgive the debts of soldiers who have been overpaid, he says. The Army has identified 331 wounded soldiers hit with debts. So far, Reid said, 99 soldiers have had debts suspended or waived. And bureaucrats now flag the payroll files of every soldier wounded in action, in an attempt to avoid problems.
But the short-term steps are only a piecemeal fix, and the integration of pay and personnel databases won't be completed until 2007—at the earliest.
advertisement
