Investigation Reveals A Military Payroll Rife With Glitches
A new investigative report from Reuters says payroll errors in the military are widespread. And that "once mistakes are detected, getting them corrected — or just explained — can test even the most persistent soldiers."
In "How the Pentagon's Payroll Quagmire Traps America's Soldiers," Reuters special enterprise correspondent Scot Paltrow and his colleague Kelly Carr report on how the antiquated and error-ridden computer system of the Defense Finance and Accounting System has at times erroneously cut soldiers' paychecks because, it claimed, the service men and women owed money or were overpaid. In some cases, Paltrow and Carr report, the military has hired collection agencies to try to recover these mistakenly charged overpayments. It has also garnisheed wages at new civilian jobs, and ruined soldiers' credit ratings.
One large part of the problem, says Paltrow, is the technology the agency uses to manage the military's payroll.
Paltrow tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that DFAS relies "on an ancient computer system that's more than 40 years old, dates basically from the dawn of the computer age, and it runs on COBOL, which is one of the first computer languages and [is] so old that it can't be updated and consequently there are a tremendous number of mistakes."
The Defense Department developed a new computer system, but according to Paltrow, "They worked on it for roughly 10 years and ended up spending a billion dollars on it, and in 2010 they decided it had been a failure, that it just wasn't going to work. They pulled the plug on it and so the billion dollars spent on the program went down the tubes, and the military was left with this antiquated system that hadn't been updated at all in more than a decade because everyone was anticipating this new, now canceled, system to come online."