When the Army Gets It Wrong
Wounded soldiers often--too often--find themselves having to battle the Pentagon over pay mistakes
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 of-ten 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 result in part 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."
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