Can the U.S. Army Reserve Pay Soldiers Correctly?

1) There were many problems with the U.S. army pay system. The army conducted an audit in the fall of 2005 that showed payment irregularities for 14 percent of the 24,000 soldiers that had been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan or evacuated for medical reasons. The Government Accountability Office reported that at the time of the audit, the Army had logged $1.5 million worth of overpayments to 1,300 soldiers wounded or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The GAO also found that non-injured soldiers were regularly receiving inaccurate paychecks, the result of reaching different stages of their deployments and redeployments. A GAO study determined that over 90 percent of soldiers in units that were mobilized in 2002 and 2003 experienced some kind of pay error that was primarily due to the lack of compatibility between the payroll and personnel systems. Before 2004, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services had been using a pay system called the Defense Joint Military Pay System. DJMS actually consisted of separate systems for active duty soldiers and reserves. The two systems did not work together easily. The DJMS Reserve Component was responsible for payroll management. Salaries, bonuses, and benefits for 200,000 reservists originated from this custom built payroll application. But the payroll management system needed information from the personnel system, known as the Regional Level Application Software system, and the two systems were not well integrated. The computer language used to write DJMS dated back almost 40 years. A new systems solution must address all of these problems and make data integration more feasible.
2) The specific improvements of Forward Compatible Payroll included a clearer Leave and Earnings Statement for soldiers, instantaneous updating of pay records, and better capabilities for updating state tax rates. The Forward Compatible Payroll phased rollout was scheduled to begin in March 2005 with the Army Reserve and National Guard, and over the course of a year extend to the active duty Army, the Air Force, and then the Navy Department. The Forward Compatible Payroll provided more automation for the mobilization process for soldiers called up for active duty. A pay administrator could use a Web browser to review mobilization orders in the personnel system and access and update files in the personnel database without duplicating the data entry for the mobilized soldiers. The mobilization application requested additional information from the administrator, such as the beginning and ending dates of deployment for each soldier, before setting the pay rate for each and adding the appropriate entitlements. After the pay rate was set, the process required a unit commander to approve and sign a hard copy of the mobilization order. Only then were the data transmitted in a nightly batch to a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database at Reserve headquarters at Fort McPhearson, Georgia. The SQL server formatted the data so that the Reserve payroll system could process them. The data were uploaded to a local server at a pay processing center, where staff members used Web browser software to review the pay records. Soldier tour of duty dates and pay data were then exported to the Reserve payroll system, which then paid the soldiers. This process should be improved by being capable of replacing over 30 legacy applications in the Army branch of the Armed Forces alone. This process should eliminate redundant data entries, simplify all processes related to personnel and payroll, and greatly reduce the number of mistakes that find their way through to pay stubs.
3) End users and technical specialists have a big role in analyzing the problem and developing a solution. End users can tell when something goes wrong in the system. People can tell when they are being underpaid, not necessarily when they are being overpaid though. Soldiers brought attention to the fact that they were not being paid correctly and this caused the system to change. Technical specialists must develop a solution to these complex problems. Technical specialists have a role in both analyzing and getting an understanding of the full scope of the problem, and then introducing steps to solve the problem.