Wounded troops: Pay mistakes add to hardship
Having nearly lost his life in Iraq, the 1st Infantry Division soldier became lost to the Army payroll system because of a paperwork snafu as he lay comatose in a veterans hospital near Chicago. As a result, an Army bureaucrat classified him as absent without leave and cut off his pay, as is sometimes done when the system loses track of a soldier. The theory is that a GI wrongly listed as AWOL will start shouting and then the issue can be resolved. "That may work for an able-bodied soldier," says Michael Hurst, a former Army finance officer, "but it doesn't work so well for a guy in a coma in Chicago."
The case of the AWOL grunt in the coma may be particularly egregious, but it exemplifies the widespread problems with an Army pay system that often doesn't get the numbers right. The problems have imposed the greatest hardship on wounded soldiers, who have to battle over financial problems even as they cope with physical ones.
"Significant errors." The thousands of wounded soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan have overwhelmed the Army's aging finance system. An internal audit conducted earlier this year by Hurst, then a captain in an Army finance battalion, showed that 82 percent of the 1st Infantry Division soldiers wounded in Iraq had "significant errors" in their paychecks. Based on his own investigation of 123 wounded 1st Infantry Division soldiers, and another examination of problems with soldiers stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, Hurst estimates in his March 2005 audit that up to 4,000 of the soldiers seriously injured in Iraq have encountered payroll problems.
Congress has already raised concerns about National Guard and Reserve soldiers who have had pay problems, and the House Government Reform Committee plans further hearings this week to examine the military's attempts to improve that pay system. But the audit of the 1st Infantry Division shows that the errors are not confined to reservists. Indeed, the Government Accountability Office, in the wake of the hearings, has expanded an ongoing investigation to include pay problems with active-duty troops.
The problems in part result from the military's reliance on separate finance, medical, and personnel databases. The current system, designed in the 1970s, is so antiquated that sometimes data on a particular soldier must be manually extracted from one database for use in another. The Defense Department is trying to create a combined system, but the project has fallen behind because of the sheer complexity of the task.
The problems Hurst found in his audit include soldiers who were underpaid and overpaid. The payroll systems must keep up with factors such as combat pay and overseas cost of living adjustments—bonuses that eventually expire when a soldier returns home wounded. If not, the soldier can be overpaid for months, creating something of a windfall at a time when his injuries are creating unexpected bills for family members. At first blush, this doesn't seem so bad. In reality, though, it causes serious problems later on, when a soldier's pay is docked to offset the overpayments.
"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.