7 ms·

How the Pentagon’s payroll quagmire traps soldiers

65 points by speeder 13y ago

tantalor 13y ago
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".
- bluedino 13y ago
  Why not just outsource it to ADP for $5 billion?
- frankydp 13y ago
  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.
speeder 13y ago
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)
mpyne 13y ago
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. :-/
grecy 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
sswezey 13y ago
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.
- mbrameld 13y ago
  Wouldn't she have noticed it at her next scheduled TIS increase?
- phaus 13y ago
  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.
Everlag 13y ago
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 13y ago
  > 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.
JPKab 13y ago
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.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  I hate to be snarky, but I could rant and joke for a long time about the state of information processing at DoD. What came to my mind first? The funniest part about DFAS is that it has the word "accounting" in it :) Once a project gets entangled with the massive systems-of-systems stuff DoD has going on in all of its agencies the prospects for improvement are slim. Remember, each system has its own champion, and folks making money keeping it updated. Many of these folks have powerful friends. Good luck to you, sir.
- stephengillie 13y ago
  I've heard a friend, who is an Army drill sergent, complain about how badly their new system works compared to the old one.
- jcurbo 13y ago
  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-ecss/2012-11-29 http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/air-force-cancels-ec...) 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.
bmmayer1 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Why should the armed forces be last?
  - rhizome 13y ago
    I'll start with "subject to dying or being maimed for their job."
protomyth 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      > 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).
rayiner 13y ago
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.
- DoubleMalt 13y ago
  I wonder what the IRS and/or the shareholders would say if Wal-Mart would state "that its books are in such disarray that an audit is impossible".
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  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.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    It's OK though, we in the DoD will be audit ready... by like, FY-2016. sigh
  - rayiner 13y ago
    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.
Aloha 13y ago
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.
hudibras 13y ago
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.
coldcode 13y ago
Solution - put the NSA in charge of payroll and put the Pentagon payroll people in charge of spying on us. Win all around!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
D9u 13y ago
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?

65 points by speeder 13y ago

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".

bluedino 13y ago
Why not just outsource it to ADP for $5 billion?
frankydp 13y ago
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.

speeder 13y ago

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)

mpyne 13y ago

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. :-/

grecy 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

sswezey 13y ago

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.

mbrameld 13y ago
Wouldn't she have noticed it at her next scheduled TIS increase?
phaus 13y ago
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.

Everlag 13y ago

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 13y ago
> 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.

JPKab 13y ago

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.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I hate to be snarky, but I could rant and joke for a long time about the state of information processing at DoD. What came to my mind first? The funniest part about DFAS is that it has the word "accounting" in it :) Once a project gets entangled with the massive systems-of-systems stuff DoD has going on in all of its agencies the prospects for improvement are slim. Remember, each system has its own champion, and folks making money keeping it updated. Many of these folks have powerful friends. Good luck to you, sir.
stephengillie 13y ago
I've heard a friend, who is an Army drill sergent, complain about how badly their new system works compared to the old one.
jcurbo 13y ago
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-ecss/2012-11-29 http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/air-force-cancels-ec...) 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.

bmmayer1 13y ago

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 13y ago
Why should the armed forces be last?
- rhizome 13y ago
  I'll start with "subject to dying or being maimed for their job."

protomyth 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    > 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).

rayiner 13y ago

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.

DoubleMalt 13y ago
I wonder what the IRS and/or the shareholders would say if Wal-Mart would state "that its books are in such disarray that an audit is impossible".
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
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.
- mpyne 13y ago
  It's OK though, we in the DoD will be audit ready... by like, FY-2016. sigh
- rayiner 13y ago
  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.

Aloha 13y ago

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.

hudibras 13y ago

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.

coldcode 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

D9u 13y ago

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?