Re:Thousands of California soldiers forced to repay enlistme...
by navbaker on Sunday October 23, 2016 @01:51PM
(#12774545)
>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.
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...
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-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/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.