9 ms·

"Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the co

"Robert D’Andrea, a retired Army major and Iraq veteran, was told to return a $20,000 bonus he received in 2008 because auditors could not find a copy of the contract he says he signed." How is this possible? If private businesses could do this, it would be mayhem.

dogma1138 10y ago
I'm surprised that this is somehow even passed the slightest political oversight. You need to be a special kind of bastard to ask some one who willingly signed up to get shot at while defending their country to pay back any amount of money they got paid for doing so. Wars aren't pretty, regardless of what you think about them, and especially about Iraq and Afghanistan never ever take it out on the soldiers, they are probably on your side because unlike most of us they actually seen war. Soldiers don't decide when, where or against whom to go to war, they are not at fault I never understood how the left in the US could blame people who either got drafted (vietnam) or signed up to defend their country (post 9/11) for the atrocities of war.
- mnem 10y ago
  Well, they decide when they enlist to go kill people when told to.
  - gtaylor 10y ago
    Some of them get out of extreme poverty or are able to go to school afterwards by enlisting. It's not as simple as that.
  - dlp211 10y ago
    Hardly, the vast majority of jobs in the US Army are non-combat. You shouldn't paint with such a broad brush, many who serve do so out of a sense of duty to the nation, to escape a bad situation including poverty or get out of a dying town, and/or to gain access to higher education through the use of tuition assistance and GI Bill programs.
    - vacri 10y ago
      How do you get to enlistment age in modern western society, where every second movie and video game is about military guys blowing things up and massacring wave after wave of lemming-enemy, without thinking that the army is there to kill people? If you're in a non-combat role, you're still there explicitly to support those in a combat role.
      - smsm42 10y ago
        Maybe some people don't limit their horizons to what you can learn from video games.
        vacri 10y ago
        That's a razor-thin demographic you're talking about there: worldly people that don't understand that armies are about killing others.
    - brbsix 10y ago
      Many people also turn to crime in an attempt to escape poverty or a dying town. Certainly we can have empathy for desperate people making difficult decisions, but it doesn't absolve them of moral agency or place them above scrutiny.
      - jcbeard 10y ago
        moral agency? scrutiny? these Soldiers were likely lied to by recruiters desperate to increase recruiting numbers in the longest war the US has fought. I suspect the churn in personnel was enormous, and the pressure was on. Sure, likely the details were buried somewhere in 30 pages of paperwork that each Soldier signed...and likely would have been caught if there were a lawyer looking of it. But these Soldiers don't have lawyers when signing up typically. I guess re-enlistees could have consulted JAG, however this isn't the norm. Recruiters are usually trusted. Somebody in the recruiting chain of command should have been been monitoring the numbers. They're the ones who should be at fault, not the Soldiers who've already served in good faith based on promises that weren't supposed to have been made.
  - sven-1 10y ago
    Happens all over the place. They just buy into the narrative Either because they don't have better options (those kids have my sympathies) or they are just programmable. "Kill the goat herder and defend freedom" downloading that narrative into somebodies head whether its a grunt or a president, is not that different from programming the robots at Google and Facebook to chant about "do no evil" and "make the world more open and connected " all the while turning the Internet into a sewer. Hope always lies in people who aren't robots.
  - gnarbarian 10y ago
    This is laughably ignorant.
  - partisan 10y ago
    That is a pretty flat take on what exactly is happening. If you've never had to view military service as a "good" path out of poverty then it might seem as simple as that but surely if you sat and thought for a few minutes, you might be able to conceive of a situation in which someone might sign up for reasons other than the one you've given.
- JabavuAdams 10y ago
  I wouldn't blame someone who got drafted, but it is reasonable to fault someone for joining a volunteer army of a militarily aggressive nation. If you sign up to become a fire-fighter or paramedic, you will never be in a position where the machine you are a piece of requires / encourages you to kill people who don't need killing. The fact is that there are parts of war / military life that are more exciting than being a fire-fighter, say. It's also culturally reinforced and lauded. I've almost signed up at various times, but I view it as a form of "combat tourism." We have almost a century of literature and culture devoted to uncovering the dark side of modern warfare. In addition, we have a large number of cases where our own governments have lied to us that are well documented, and entirely uncontroversial. That said, I still see the appeal. It's just not a situation I want to allow myself to be put in.
  - BlytheSchuma 10y ago
    Wow, you somehow made this about you again.
  - jcbeard 10y ago
    Sometimes you don't have a choice, as you so blithely put it. Many people join the military because they would otherwise have no other career, or because they need a leg up, or health insurance (pre-affordable care act). So if someone offered you an extra years salary that would allow you to put your kids through college for doing something that you feel serves the people of your country, wouldn't you take it? How about if your kid had cancer, and you and your wife after working 3 jobs couldn't make a dent in the 150K medical debt created through our medical industrial complex? Wouldn't you take a change at giving your family a better life if you had no other way to do so? Not sure where you're getting the idea of "combat tourism," but please be my guest and sign up...enjoy!
    - Hondor 10y ago
      Many people joined the Taliban for those reasons, and ISIS and Al Quaeda. Many common criminals commit crime because they need money too. Just because you're desperate, doesn't give you the right to kill people. Just because you feel it serves your country doesn't make it OK to ruin someone else's country. These soldiers complaining about their money helped to destroy Iraq and caused the deaths of 100s of thousands of people.
- vacri 10y ago
  While I'm certainly of the opinion that this is a ridiculous situation and those bonuses should be left alone (salary of 42 auditors alone would probably take the lion's share of the recoverable funds, independent of the moral issue), let's keep things in perspective - deployment to Iraq was not 'defending their country'. The US was never threatened by Iraq. Similarly, not everyone in Vietnam got drafted, and even if they were drafted, that's no excuse for the abuses there. If you're signed up to fight against your will, that's no excuse for taking part in activities such as the My Lai massacre. Where is the moral high ground in punishing innocent foreigners because your government on the other side of the world forced you to fight?
  - donw 10y ago
    People serve in the military for all kinds of reasons. Some, because it's a family tradition. Others, because they believe in serving their country. And many others, because it presents them with an economic opportunity they would never otherwise have had: college, vocational training, and increased social status. Very few join hoping to go to war. I doubt that most of the people sent to invade Iraq truly wanted to be there. And when they went, they were sold a well-scripted dog-and-pony show about how they were defending the freedom of the Iraqi people, about how they were there to fight a horrible dictator that murdered countless innocent lives. Those people are not to blame, and certainly not to be held responsible, for the utter failure of both our political system and our media, which is supposed to be a watchdog, not a lapdog. Also, something most civilians don't know is that military service isn't like a regular job. In civilian life, you can quit your job whenever you want. In the military, while you may be able to change your job and re-train for a new one, it's not that common. Also, you do your job until you finish your term of service, or you go to jail. Only way out is to be assessed by a military doctor as unfit to serve. In civilian life, if you screw up, screw off, or screw around, the worst that will probably happen is being fired. In the military, at best you will face Non-Judicial Punishment for minor infractions (show up late to work once), and at worst you go to jail (keep showing up late for work). How severely punished you will be is in large part up to your boss (commanding officer). What makes it worse is that most people only see the marketing campaign before they join (pay for college! defend freedom!). But after they enlist, they discover that they don't get the job they were promised (we're full up on surgical assistants and aircraft mechanics, so you'll be sent to train for food service), that they spend countless hours on utterly pointless work (yet another safety briefing), and that overall, the life of a service member is pretty much the opposite of glamorous. You don't need to worship the uniform, or agree with what the US Government does, to at least appreciate that people who serve in the military are, generally speaking, at worst a bunch of well-meaning Americans that are doing the best job they can in a situation that they largely can't control. Oh, and once you get out? Getting all that college funding and a lifetime of government healthcare ranges from "easy peasy" to "tell me again why I made a deal with the unholy spawn of Initech from Office Space and Satan's legal team"
- paulmd 10y ago
  Unfortunately this is par for the course. DFAS' accounting systems are antiquated, involving 2200 individual systems, manual re-entry when data needs to be moved around, and "fudge" entries to fix the errors in the books. When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 Another similar situation that came up when I was searching down the first article: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad-fighting-bureaucratic-back-pay-claw-back-article-1.2691820 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad... It's been happening for decades now. On the whole, the Pentagon budget is one of the few (perhaps the only?) Federal budgets that is so screwed up that it can't even be audited. The pay for soldiers is just the tip of the iceberg here, contractors are also getting massively overpaid and the USG is not nearly as good about clawing those back (since contractors can fight back). Literally hundreds of billions of dollars each year are moving around these systems, and we cannot even reliably trace where they are going. There's no political will to fix this because people automatically assume military = classified and golly we can't audit classified books. Another huge part of the population has a totemic fetishization of the military and criticising their books translates to criticizing the military itself. So in turn we end up tolerating terrible bookkeeping that would never be allowed in another Federal department let alone the private sector... http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-Bookkeeping-Means-65-Trillion-Can-t-Pass-Audit http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-B... The USG civil retirement system is similarly weird and terrible. Please reference: the giant cave system where they have to keep multiple hundreds of thousands of square feet of cabinets full of paper records. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhol... This terrible mess of ancient, individual systems is replicated all over the USG. The VA system operates similarly (cited above). During the 2011 and 2013 default crises the Treasury systems had no way of controlling individual payments, knowing the overall reserves at a future point in time, or even knowing when individual payments were going to happen.
  - navbaker 10y ago
    >When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers. I know from personal experience that if the military overpays you for anything, there's often no warning between when they find the error and when they garnish your paycheck. SOP is to take everything back at once, leaving the servicemember with nothing and with no warning. DFAS is supposed to send a letter of indebtedness to give the family time to prepare for any financial adjustments, this often arrives after the first garnishment.
- return0 10y ago
  My understanding is that the US has a professional army. Why are they called "volunteers"? Over here, a volunteer is someone who voluntarily joins earlier than required to begin his mandatory army service. People who join a job are all volunteers of course, but that's not remarkable.
  - holdenk 10y ago
    Its called volunteer because there is mandatory service or conscription in other countries.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    There are two types of military service compulsory and voluntary hence they are called volunteers. Compulsory involves conscription or a draft, I'm not sure how the "jail or army" thing is classified but since you are given a choice it's technically stelly voluntary. The "professional" classification of the army doesn't mean it's voluntary professional means that you can be a career soldier and you are paid for doing so even if you are drafted, conscripts on the other hand are not paid other than a small stipend. That said once you sign up the contract this isn't a job, you can't quit, you can't "call in sick", can't say no to anything, you are effectively forced to give up certain rights for the duration of the contract.
    - return0 10y ago
      compulsory is definitely not voluntary. otoh i dont think theres any difference between professional and voluntary.
x1798DE 10y ago
I would think that the fact that they paid him should be de facto evidence that he signed a contract for the money, and that the burden of proof would be on them to show that the contract was invalid for some reason.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  Based on the amount, they can probably determine what kind of bonus it was (special forces, radio operator, etc.) and then determine if he was eligible for any of those bonuses.
  - startling 10y ago
    ...except the whole problem is that they overpaid bonuses.
    - tedunangst 10y ago
      Yeah. They gave the radio operator bonus to the cook (as an example). It's easy to see from the amount it was the radio bonus, and it's easy to see from the service record somebody was a cook, and that was bonus was overpaid. And now they want their money back (which is pretty shitty, given the circumstances). But the amounts of the correct bonus and the given bonus are not unknowable. These aren't bespoke contracts, every one unique.
      - mariuolo 10y ago
        Unless they can show bad faith on the part of the beneficiary, shouldn't whoever authorised the payment be on the hook for it?
        tedunangst 10y ago
        I'm guessing here, but I imagine there's a clause like "recipient agrees to attend X training, and return bonus otherwise." Whether the recipient remembers seeing that clause is another matter.
sjg007 10y ago
Always always keep your paperwork..
- WalterBright 10y ago
  I do lots of contracts with people. Sometimes I've been told the other party "lost" the contract or "didn't remember making a deal with me", etc. I say "no problem, I have a copy of it right here with your signature on it!" It doesn't happen very often, but enough to make it worthwhile to always keep a copy.
paulddraper 10y ago
"Hm, we were reviewing decade old records and we make a mistake by overpaying you by tens of thousands. Give it back." What employers are legally able to get away with this?
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  In the US, employers that overpay you can absolutely demand it back - it's also usually covered directly in your employment contract if you have one. Now, a decade later may be too late (and looks terrible) but it's certainly possible for shorter time periods.
beambot 10y ago
That sounds like a scam. If the collecting agent can't find proper documentation, then there is no indebtedness. I would wait until they served you papers, then get any sane judge to throw out all charges. If they send it to collections then go at them with full might of consumer and labor protections.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Would this be through a civilian court? Or a military court?
jcbeard 10y ago
and this is why I have three giant books upstairs in the attic, with every order, leave request, expense report that I've ever made. Soldiers are used to it. We've come to call them "I love me books" ( http://www.ezarmypoints.com/army-i-love-me-book/ http://www.ezarmypoints.com/army-i-love-me-book/ ). They shouldn't be able to come back after that many years for a signature, that's insane.
mangeletti 10y ago
If they cannot find a contract, doesn't that mean they have no evidence that he owes them money? Doesn't mean that they would have to take him to civil court for a tort, but then it would just be their word against his?
zhemao 10y ago
Didn't he keep a copy of his own employment contract? If it's the only copy, shouldn't that be the one that has legal force?

dogma1138 10y ago

I'm surprised that this is somehow even passed the slightest political oversight. You need to be a special kind of bastard to ask some one who willingly signed up to get shot at while defending their country to pay back any amount of money they got paid for doing so. Wars aren't pretty, regardless of what you think about them, and especially about Iraq and Afghanistan never ever take it out on the soldiers, they are probably on your side because unlike most of us they actually seen war. Soldiers don't decide when, where or against whom to go to war, they are not at fault I never understood how the left in the US could blame people who either got drafted (vietnam) or signed up to defend their country (post 9/11) for the atrocities of war.

mnem 10y ago
Well, they decide when they enlist to go kill people when told to.
- gtaylor 10y ago
  Some of them get out of extreme poverty or are able to go to school afterwards by enlisting. It's not as simple as that.
- dlp211 10y ago
  Hardly, the vast majority of jobs in the US Army are non-combat. You shouldn't paint with such a broad brush, many who serve do so out of a sense of duty to the nation, to escape a bad situation including poverty or get out of a dying town, and/or to gain access to higher education through the use of tuition assistance and GI Bill programs.
  - vacri 10y ago
    How do you get to enlistment age in modern western society, where every second movie and video game is about military guys blowing things up and massacring wave after wave of lemming-enemy, without thinking that the army is there to kill people? If you're in a non-combat role, you're still there explicitly to support those in a combat role.
    - smsm42 10y ago
      Maybe some people don't limit their horizons to what you can learn from video games.
      - vacri 10y ago
        That's a razor-thin demographic you're talking about there: worldly people that don't understand that armies are about killing others.
  - brbsix 10y ago
    Many people also turn to crime in an attempt to escape poverty or a dying town. Certainly we can have empathy for desperate people making difficult decisions, but it doesn't absolve them of moral agency or place them above scrutiny.
    - jcbeard 10y ago
      moral agency? scrutiny? these Soldiers were likely lied to by recruiters desperate to increase recruiting numbers in the longest war the US has fought. I suspect the churn in personnel was enormous, and the pressure was on. Sure, likely the details were buried somewhere in 30 pages of paperwork that each Soldier signed...and likely would have been caught if there were a lawyer looking of it. But these Soldiers don't have lawyers when signing up typically. I guess re-enlistees could have consulted JAG, however this isn't the norm. Recruiters are usually trusted. Somebody in the recruiting chain of command should have been been monitoring the numbers. They're the ones who should be at fault, not the Soldiers who've already served in good faith based on promises that weren't supposed to have been made.
- sven-1 10y ago
  Happens all over the place. They just buy into the narrative Either because they don't have better options (those kids have my sympathies) or they are just programmable. "Kill the goat herder and defend freedom" downloading that narrative into somebodies head whether its a grunt or a president, is not that different from programming the robots at Google and Facebook to chant about "do no evil" and "make the world more open and connected " all the while turning the Internet into a sewer. Hope always lies in people who aren't robots.
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  This is laughably ignorant.
- partisan 10y ago
  That is a pretty flat take on what exactly is happening. If you've never had to view military service as a "good" path out of poverty then it might seem as simple as that but surely if you sat and thought for a few minutes, you might be able to conceive of a situation in which someone might sign up for reasons other than the one you've given.
JabavuAdams 10y ago
I wouldn't blame someone who got drafted, but it is reasonable to fault someone for joining a volunteer army of a militarily aggressive nation. If you sign up to become a fire-fighter or paramedic, you will never be in a position where the machine you are a piece of requires / encourages you to kill people who don't need killing. The fact is that there are parts of war / military life that are more exciting than being a fire-fighter, say. It's also culturally reinforced and lauded. I've almost signed up at various times, but I view it as a form of "combat tourism." We have almost a century of literature and culture devoted to uncovering the dark side of modern warfare. In addition, we have a large number of cases where our own governments have lied to us that are well documented, and entirely uncontroversial. That said, I still see the appeal. It's just not a situation I want to allow myself to be put in.
- BlytheSchuma 10y ago
  Wow, you somehow made this about you again.
- jcbeard 10y ago
  Sometimes you don't have a choice, as you so blithely put it. Many people join the military because they would otherwise have no other career, or because they need a leg up, or health insurance (pre-affordable care act). So if someone offered you an extra years salary that would allow you to put your kids through college for doing something that you feel serves the people of your country, wouldn't you take it? How about if your kid had cancer, and you and your wife after working 3 jobs couldn't make a dent in the 150K medical debt created through our medical industrial complex? Wouldn't you take a change at giving your family a better life if you had no other way to do so? Not sure where you're getting the idea of "combat tourism," but please be my guest and sign up...enjoy!
  - Hondor 10y ago
    Many people joined the Taliban for those reasons, and ISIS and Al Quaeda. Many common criminals commit crime because they need money too. Just because you're desperate, doesn't give you the right to kill people. Just because you feel it serves your country doesn't make it OK to ruin someone else's country. These soldiers complaining about their money helped to destroy Iraq and caused the deaths of 100s of thousands of people.
vacri 10y ago
While I'm certainly of the opinion that this is a ridiculous situation and those bonuses should be left alone (salary of 42 auditors alone would probably take the lion's share of the recoverable funds, independent of the moral issue), let's keep things in perspective - deployment to Iraq was not 'defending their country'. The US was never threatened by Iraq. Similarly, not everyone in Vietnam got drafted, and even if they were drafted, that's no excuse for the abuses there. If you're signed up to fight against your will, that's no excuse for taking part in activities such as the My Lai massacre. Where is the moral high ground in punishing innocent foreigners because your government on the other side of the world forced you to fight?
- donw 10y ago
  People serve in the military for all kinds of reasons. Some, because it's a family tradition. Others, because they believe in serving their country. And many others, because it presents them with an economic opportunity they would never otherwise have had: college, vocational training, and increased social status. Very few join hoping to go to war. I doubt that most of the people sent to invade Iraq truly wanted to be there. And when they went, they were sold a well-scripted dog-and-pony show about how they were defending the freedom of the Iraqi people, about how they were there to fight a horrible dictator that murdered countless innocent lives. Those people are not to blame, and certainly not to be held responsible, for the utter failure of both our political system and our media, which is supposed to be a watchdog, not a lapdog. Also, something most civilians don't know is that military service isn't like a regular job. In civilian life, you can quit your job whenever you want. In the military, while you may be able to change your job and re-train for a new one, it's not that common. Also, you do your job until you finish your term of service, or you go to jail. Only way out is to be assessed by a military doctor as unfit to serve. In civilian life, if you screw up, screw off, or screw around, the worst that will probably happen is being fired. In the military, at best you will face Non-Judicial Punishment for minor infractions (show up late to work once), and at worst you go to jail (keep showing up late for work). How severely punished you will be is in large part up to your boss (commanding officer). What makes it worse is that most people only see the marketing campaign before they join (pay for college! defend freedom!). But after they enlist, they discover that they don't get the job they were promised (we're full up on surgical assistants and aircraft mechanics, so you'll be sent to train for food service), that they spend countless hours on utterly pointless work (yet another safety briefing), and that overall, the life of a service member is pretty much the opposite of glamorous. You don't need to worship the uniform, or agree with what the US Government does, to at least appreciate that people who serve in the military are, generally speaking, at worst a bunch of well-meaning Americans that are doing the best job they can in a situation that they largely can't control. Oh, and once you get out? Getting all that college funding and a lifetime of government healthcare ranges from "easy peasy" to "tell me again why I made a deal with the unholy spawn of Initech from Office Space and Satan's legal team"
paulmd 10y ago
Unfortunately this is par for the course. DFAS' accounting systems are antiquated, involving 2200 individual systems, manual re-entry when data needs to be moved around, and "fudge" entries to fix the errors in the books. When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers. http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part1 Another similar situation that came up when I was searching down the first article: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad-fighting-bureaucratic-back-pay-claw-back-article-1.2691820 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pentagon-bomb-squad... It's been happening for decades now. On the whole, the Pentagon budget is one of the few (perhaps the only?) Federal budgets that is so screwed up that it can't even be audited. The pay for soldiers is just the tip of the iceberg here, contractors are also getting massively overpaid and the USG is not nearly as good about clawing those back (since contractors can fight back). Literally hundreds of billions of dollars each year are moving around these systems, and we cannot even reliably trace where they are going. There's no political will to fix this because people automatically assume military = classified and golly we can't audit classified books. Another huge part of the population has a totemic fetishization of the military and criticising their books translates to criticizing the military itself. So in turn we end up tolerating terrible bookkeeping that would never be allowed in another Federal department let alone the private sector... http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-Bookkeeping-Means-65-Trillion-Can-t-Pass-Audit http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2016/07/31/Pentagon-s-Sloppy-B... The USG civil retirement system is similarly weird and terrible. Please reference: the giant cave system where they have to keep multiple hundreds of thousands of square feet of cabinets full of paper records. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhol... This terrible mess of ancient, individual systems is replicated all over the USG. The VA system operates similarly (cited above). During the 2011 and 2013 default crises the Treasury systems had no way of controlling individual payments, knowing the overall reserves at a future point in time, or even knowing when individual payments were going to happen.
- navbaker 10y ago
  >When the mistakes inevitably happen, they then try to claw back the overpayments from the soldiers. I know from personal experience that if the military overpays you for anything, there's often no warning between when they find the error and when they garnish your paycheck. SOP is to take everything back at once, leaving the servicemember with nothing and with no warning. DFAS is supposed to send a letter of indebtedness to give the family time to prepare for any financial adjustments, this often arrives after the first garnishment.
return0 10y ago
My understanding is that the US has a professional army. Why are they called "volunteers"? Over here, a volunteer is someone who voluntarily joins earlier than required to begin his mandatory army service. People who join a job are all volunteers of course, but that's not remarkable.
- holdenk 10y ago
  Its called volunteer because there is mandatory service or conscription in other countries.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  There are two types of military service compulsory and voluntary hence they are called volunteers. Compulsory involves conscription or a draft, I'm not sure how the "jail or army" thing is classified but since you are given a choice it's technically stelly voluntary. The "professional" classification of the army doesn't mean it's voluntary professional means that you can be a career soldier and you are paid for doing so even if you are drafted, conscripts on the other hand are not paid other than a small stipend. That said once you sign up the contract this isn't a job, you can't quit, you can't "call in sick", can't say no to anything, you are effectively forced to give up certain rights for the duration of the contract.
  - return0 10y ago
    compulsory is definitely not voluntary. otoh i dont think theres any difference between professional and voluntary.

x1798DE 10y ago

I would think that the fact that they paid him should be de facto evidence that he signed a contract for the money, and that the burden of proof would be on them to show that the contract was invalid for some reason.

tedunangst 10y ago
Based on the amount, they can probably determine what kind of bonus it was (special forces, radio operator, etc.) and then determine if he was eligible for any of those bonuses.
- startling 10y ago
  ...except the whole problem is that they overpaid bonuses.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    Yeah. They gave the radio operator bonus to the cook (as an example). It's easy to see from the amount it was the radio bonus, and it's easy to see from the service record somebody was a cook, and that was bonus was overpaid. And now they want their money back (which is pretty shitty, given the circumstances). But the amounts of the correct bonus and the given bonus are not unknowable. These aren't bespoke contracts, every one unique.
    - mariuolo 10y ago
      Unless they can show bad faith on the part of the beneficiary, shouldn't whoever authorised the payment be on the hook for it?
      - tedunangst 10y ago
        I'm guessing here, but I imagine there's a clause like "recipient agrees to attend X training, and return bonus otherwise." Whether the recipient remembers seeing that clause is another matter.

sjg007 10y ago

Always always keep your paperwork..

WalterBright 10y ago
I do lots of contracts with people. Sometimes I've been told the other party "lost" the contract or "didn't remember making a deal with me", etc. I say "no problem, I have a copy of it right here with your signature on it!" It doesn't happen very often, but enough to make it worthwhile to always keep a copy.

paulddraper 10y ago

"Hm, we were reviewing decade old records and we make a mistake by overpaying you by tens of thousands. Give it back." What employers are legally able to get away with this?

alasdair_ 10y ago
In the US, employers that overpay you can absolutely demand it back - it's also usually covered directly in your employment contract if you have one. Now, a decade later may be too late (and looks terrible) but it's certainly possible for shorter time periods.

beambot 10y ago

That sounds like a scam. If the collecting agent can't find proper documentation, then there is no indebtedness. I would wait until they served you papers, then get any sane judge to throw out all charges. If they send it to collections then go at them with full might of consumer and labor protections.

CaptSpify 10y ago
Would this be through a civilian court? Or a military court?

jcbeard 10y ago

and this is why I have three giant books upstairs in the attic, with every order, leave request, expense report that I've ever made. Soldiers are used to it. We've come to call them "I love me books" ( http://www.ezarmypoints.com/army-i-love-me-book/ http://www.ezarmypoints.com/army-i-love-me-book/ ). They shouldn't be able to come back after that many years for a signature, that's insane.

mangeletti 10y ago

If they cannot find a contract, doesn't that mean they have no evidence that he owes them money? Doesn't mean that they would have to take him to civil court for a tort, but then it would just be their word against his?

zhemao 10y ago

Didn't he keep a copy of his own employment contract? If it's the only copy, shouldn't that be the one that has legal force?