Posted by Tina
Our military men and women deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Most importantly their medical treatment should be stellar and their compensation should be delivered in a timely fashion. Unfortunately there are too many reports that soldiers in need are falling through the bureaucratic cracks. Reuters released it’s findings from a special investigation:
Shawn Aiken is an American veteran of two tours of combat duty in Iraq and Afghanistan but he met perhaps his most formidable foe back home—the Defense Department’s finance and accounting department. During treatment for a brain injury, PTSD, and other afflictions, the Army stopped paying Aiken. His salary for December 2011 came in at $117.99. He struggled to pay his medical bills, put food on the table for his family, buy gifts for his young children for Christmas. The Defense Department treated him like a bad soldier and couldn’t explain why he wasn’t being paid.
“Aiken’s case is hardly isolated,” a detailed Reuters investigation reads. “Pay errors in the military are widespread.” The reason is antiquated computer programs and databases that can’t communicate with one another (one uses an obsolete, half-century-old language). “The Pentagon is literally unable to account for itself … The Government Accountability Office said DFAS and the Army have no way to ensure correct pay for soldiers and no way to track errors.”
It’s more than disrespectful and hurtful to the families of soldiers who go into combat to defend the United States and the American people. “It is an incredibly inefficient, wasteful way of doing business,” says the retired commander of the US Central Command.
Our government uses resources to house and track our emails and phone conversations…every keystroke on our computers if they choose to…but they can’t find the resources for a better computer and accounting system for the Department of Defense?
The facility in Utah is 1.5 million square feet…bigger than the Pentagon! How much do you suppose this operation, and its computers cost?
Outrageous!