How the Pentagon’s payroll quagmire traps soldiers
preview.reuters.com
preview.reuters.com
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.
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.
ECSS was an eye opener for me when it came to one of the key challenges in reforming IT in the DoD: geographically isolated fiefdoms that make up the legacy systems that any new, efficient, integrated will replace. The awful truth is that the knowledge required to build new, integrated systems is in the heads of the workers of the disparate legacy systems, scattered in helter skelter throughout the country. These workers don't WANT any new system to succeed. They know there is no way they are going to be have a job with the new consolidated system in place. They, for the most part, are coasters who haven't kept a remotely current skill set, and could NEVER get a job in the private sector. So they drag their feet, won't return the phone calls of business analysts, let alone cooperate with them in documenting the current data and processes.
I love the military community, especially the officers and enlisted. I like about a 1/4 of the civillians I encounter. The other 3/4 of the civillian workforce I encounter are either lazy or grossly incompetent. I hate saying that, but its been brewing too long in my head for me to think any different. The 12,000 asshats at DFAS are proof.
And even then it looks like our PSDs will have to be submitting tons of DWOWS trouble tickets to manually fix things up in the servicemember's MMPA after something in the NSIPS <-> DJMS interface fails to take properly.
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.
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.
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.
At the same time, something tells me that the OMB has no problem paying their employees...
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.
Wal-Mart, who has about a million employees, has faced similar problems.
None of this excuses errors, but it's the members' responsibility to notice any errors and report them to their disbursing office. Once reported, the vast majority of errors are fixed within two weeks.
12,000 employees divided by $1.3 billion budget equals $108,000/employee. Yes, they have capital costs, but you can bet that there are some bloated salaries in there. Considering that they are headquartered in Indianapolis, the cost of living is incredibly low there.
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.
I don't have much to say about this, except "wow".
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.
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.
Yes, this is disgusting, but let's not pretend "American citizens" have had any real say in this kind of treatment.
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.
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
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.
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).
This is how it works now. The improvement needs to be the standardization of personnel record keeping. The root of DFAS's problems come from the fact that each branch has its entirely unique personnel codes, acronyms, and other stuff. If the DOD was ever able to standardize the personnel record then they could begin to standardize payroll.
An example: the last date that you are under contract to serve can be called the following: EAS, ECC, EOS, RCN, EOS*. All of which represent different dates to different branches and components.
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)