

How the Pentagon’s payroll quagmire traps soldiers - speeder
http://preview.reuters.com/2013/7/2/wounded-in-battle-stiffed-by-the-pentagon

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JPKab
I am currently working on a team who is replacing the hodgepodge of pay and
personnel systems the Air Force uses with a single system.

The old COBOL systems are an absolute nightmare. DFAS is a nightmare. The
entrenched bureaucracy is a nightmare.

There was already an effort to integrate these systems for the entire DoD, the
idea being that paying a Naval, Air Force, or Army person shouldn't be too
different. It completely failed due to stupid decisions made involving bloated
enterprise software, but most crucially a lack of leadership at the top to
force the various branches of the military to shut the fuck up and accept
change.

Now, each service is building an integrated system. I'm happy to say that, so
far, the Air Force is doing it right. The Navy is also completely on track,
and I can't speak for the Army. I just wish they would have fixed this years
ago for the sake of these folks.

~~~
jcurbo
It's good to hear the current project is doing it right. (Former USAF here)
The Air Force hasn't done too well in recent years... DIHMRS (the integrated
one you mentioned) then ECSS, which just got cancelled at the end of last
year. ([http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/air-force-cancels-
ec...](http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/air-force-cancels-
ecss/2012-11-29))

DoD acquisition at any level is about as convoluted as imaginable, trying to
do things the 'right' way is that much harder when dealing with organizational
inertia and red tape.

~~~
JPKab
My God, don't even get me started with how awful the ECSS debacle was. I
didn't work on it, but had a buddy who did. For those reading this who don't
know the random acronyms of the DoD, ECSS was a billion dollars flushed down
the toilet attempting to integrate the dozens/hundreds? of the Air Force's
logistics systems into a single ERP. The Air Force learned (far too late) that
the only way these integrations can succeed is if all of the funding for the
legacy IT systems is controlled by the executive in charge of replacing them
with the new system. (believe it or not, they didn't have this in place
before, so the legacy systems had an actual disincentive to cooperate.)

ECSS was an eye opener for me when it came to one of the key challenges in
reforming IT in the DoD: geographically isolated fiefdoms that make up the
legacy systems that any new, efficient, integrated will replace. The awful
truth is that the knowledge required to build new, integrated systems is in
the heads of the workers of the disparate legacy systems, scattered in helter
skelter throughout the country. These workers don't WANT any new system to
succeed. They know there is no way they are going to be have a job with the
new consolidated system in place. They, for the most part, are coasters who
haven't kept a remotely current skill set, and could NEVER get a job in the
private sector. So they drag their feet, won't return the phone calls of
business analysts, let alone cooperate with them in documenting the current
data and processes.

I love the military community, especially the officers and enlisted. I like
about a 1/4 of the civillians I encounter. The other 3/4 of the civillian
workforce I encounter are either lazy or grossly incompetent. I hate saying
that, but its been brewing too long in my head for me to think any different.
The 12,000 asshats at DFAS are proof.

------
Everlag
_As proof, consider that a law in effect since 1992 requires annual audits of
all federal agencies – and the Pentagon alone has never complied. It annually
reports to Congress that its books are in such disarray that an audit is
impossible._

What the hell? How can this acceptable? God forbid an American makes a typo in
their taxes and gets audited to hell and back but if a major section of the
government says "yep, we can't do that because we are so messed up that it is
impossible to fix" they are given a pass?

Sickening and I'm not even American.

 _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._

Oh, and heres a startup idea!

 _The department’s authorized 2013 budget, after sequester, totals $565.8
billion_

And they have the cash to support it! Seriously though, who thinks "they're
own books are literally unusable, let's given em a FREAKING THIRD OF CANADA'S
GDP TO PLAY WITH!" and ends up not getting shot for treason?

Edit: As I read and read it just gets worse and worse!

 _“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._

NONONONO this is not how to run a small business let alone the largest war
machine the world has ever seen

 _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._

For the love of...

I can't continue reading, I might have a stroke.

~~~
protomyth
> I can't continue reading, I might have a stroke.

I suggest you skip reading anything about the Dept. of Interior and payments
for grazing, etc. to American Indians who have trust land. The DoI makes the
DoD look like accounting wizards.

------
sswezey
This happened to my mom after her first promotion in the US Air Force. They
forgot to increase her pay with the promotion. So they set it to the correct
one. Unfortunately, when they fixed it, they locked in that pay grade for 12
years. It wasn't until many years down the road when her CO randomly took a
look and saw the discrepancy in the pay - had he not, she would have been
stiffed 100s of thousands of dollars.

~~~
phaus
Yea this story seems really unbelievable. Who in the hell cares so little
about their income, especially with all the bullshit you have to deal with
just to work for the military? Every time I was up for a promotion, I already
knew exactly how much more money I would be getting for basic pay, housing
allowance, sustenance, and everything else.

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bmmayer1
The absolute last people who should be left off the Federal payroll are the
members of the US armed forces. Outrageous.

At the same time, something tells me that the OMB has no problem paying their
employees...

~~~
gohrt
Why should the armed forces be last?

~~~
rhizome
I'll start with "subject to dying or being maimed for their job."

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mpyne
I can't believe how excited I am for the rest of this series. A lot of the
crap they describe here is my current life, and it's about as bad as they
describe. :-/

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hudibras
For what it's worth, I spent many years in the Navy and I've seen dozens or
hundreds of issues with pay and benefits, but the vast majority of cases
(almost 100% of the time) where servicemembers have money "clawed back" from
their paychecks is because of pay and benefits that were improperly given.

And that's what happened in both of the major examples cited in the article.
One soldier doesn't notice that he's still getting benefits for his wife after
getting divorced. The other soldier continues to get paid at his prior
paygrade after being demoted for using illegal drugs.

None of this excuses any of the other points of the article (although I do
have strong opinions of everything else in it, too) but everybody with more
than a few years in the service definitely comes at this article in a
different way. Two sides to every story, is what I'm saying.

------
rayiner
Payroll system responsible for paying 2.7 million people makes lots of
mistakes. News at 11.

Wal-Mart, who has about a million employees, has faced similar problems.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Ouch. That comment seemed to me to be to be a very ill-considered and off-
handed slap down.

Yes, payroll systems have problems, but, frankly, you don't know what you're
talking about. DoD is another level of hell away from typical corporate
accounting problems. The books don't balance -- they don't have to balance.
There's no auditing system in place. Nobody can really tell where the money is
coming from or where it's going. Contractors with sweetheart deals sell and
maintain systems long after they've gone obsolete. At one point during the
2003 invasion of Iraq, I heard from an inside source that some shipping
containers were missing in-country and nobody could find them -- some _tens of
thousands_ of shipping containers.

I could go on, but I won't. This is something you really need to see for
yourself to believe. This ain't WalMart or the mom-and-pop corner grocery
store.

~~~
rayiner
I'm not saying the DOD's accounting systems don't have massive problems. I'm
jabbing at the article for not giving us enough information to justify that
conclusion. The article says that "he's not the only one with problems" but
that means nothing given the scale of the operation. With 2.7 million payees,
just a 0.01% annual error rate means hundreds of mistakes per year. That's the
equivalent of Google messing up payroll for 5-6 people each year.

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tantalor
_For 2012, Defense Department requested $17.3 billion to operate, maintain and
modernize the more than 2,200 systems it uses to manage finances, human
resources, logistics, property, and weapons acquisitions._

I don't have much to say about this, except "wow".

~~~
frankydp
The current state of technology in the DOD would require 10x that amount to
even begin to modernize.

I would argue that the root of this issue is the federal contracting system.
The barrier to entry, for any company, is so astronomical and laborious that
even big companies steer clear. The detriment caused by the complexity of
simply doing business with the federal government is only exceeded by the
entire 8(a) program.

The result of these issues is that the innovators in technology simply don't
participate, and as the systems get older and more hodge podge the cost of
modernization skyrockets.

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coldcode
Solution - put the NSA in charge of payroll and put the Pentagon payroll
people in charge of spying on us. Win all around!

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grecy
This is disgusting.

These people are risking their lives in the name of America, and America can't
even pay them what was promised.

American citizens should be ashamed their government treats these brave,
selfless people in this way.

Same goes for withholding or dwindling medical coverage for vets.

~~~
obviouslygreen
American citizens are ashamed of our government for _all sorts of reasons_ ,
in many cases including the things they have our soldiers _doing_ , much less
whether or not they're paid to do them.

Yes, this is disgusting, but let's not pretend "American citizens" have had
any real say in this kind of treatment.

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Aloha
COBOL isn't the problem, legacy systems, also, not the problem.

A severe lack of oversight, and Documentation, that's the actual problem.

Every sizable corporation has these problems, and often the new systems are
worse, or can't handle the complex pay rules. But its the lack of
documentation and oversight that makes any of these systems unmaintainable.

With Documentation, any system, no matter how old, or how obscure _is_
maintainable.

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protomyth
I wish the executive branch would have an actual CFO and some common functions
(e.g. payroll) were centralized. I get the feeling some new President spending
4 years reducing the waste in the executive branch would be quite a bit more
useful than other budget fixes.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
God centralising that is the worst thing you could do.

Give every Colonel an extra clerk and pay what the clerk says to pay, he fills
in the forms. Decentralise it.

Heavens above the US military has what, a million people? And a 12,000 strong
department cannot correctly pay them - that's a hundred salaries per person in
the department. They could write checks by hand !

I remember a quote from Microsoft - they put a hiring freeze on in late
eighties, (shrimps v wieners memo) and explained it with "we needed control
more than anything. We had enough money we could recruit our way into a huge
beureaucratic mess and would not know before it was too late"

Looks like a continental power might not have learnt that lesson

~~~
protomyth
Normally, I'm not a fan of centralization, but the audits that keep coming out
of the government show they need to get their fiscal house in order. The
disgrace that the VA has become is another symptom. Centralized personal and
payroll would help veterans by getting all the records in one place.

On a side note, I don't think anyone in the Pentagon should be doing payroll
(beyond sending the forms to say Joe/Jane is now this and should make $). I
want the same person who makes sure the President's people get paid
responsible for all of the military. They should get the same level of
service.

~~~
mpyne
> I want the same person who makes sure the President's people get paid
> responsible for all of the military. They should get the same level of
> service.

If it makes you feel better, many civil servants _do_ get paid through DFAS
payroll handling. In fact from the DFAS website it appears the Executive
Office of the President is one of the agencies that uses DFAS.

However I don't think you understand how difficult accurate payroll
maintenance from an outsourced agency would be. There's no way to remove the
Pentagon from it completely, as many entitlements are based entirely on unit-
level information (such as a CO certifying that such-and-such enlisted crew
member was distributed into a an arduous duty billet that is eligible for
special duty assignment pay).

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D9u
Maybe the Pentagon should use some of its _black budget_ funding to fix this
situation? Or is overpaying Halliburton, et al, a more acceptable use of
TAXPAYER money?

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speeder
The title change bothers me...

Yes, now the new title is the same as the article title (that guessing from
the link, also changed from what it was), but the article title might even be
a good title for the article, does not reflect the thing that might be
interesting to the people here (the huge inefficient IT with old systems)

