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| U.S. Army combat medic Shawn Aiken gets dressed to visit the VA Medical Center for an EKG appointment in El Paso, Texas. |
His war-related afflictions included traumatic brain injury, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, abnormal eye movements due to nerve damage, chronic pain and a hip injury.
But the problem that loomed largest that holiday season was different. Aiken had no money. The Defense Department was withholding big chunks of his pay.
It had started that October, when he received $2,337.56, instead of his normal monthly take-home pay of about $3,300. He quickly raised the issue with staff. It only got worse. For December, his pay came to $117.99.
Aiken was living off base with his fiancee, Monica, and her toddler daughter, while sharing custody of his two children with his ex-wife. As their money dwindled, the couple began hitting church-run food pantries and pawning their possessions — jewelry, games, an iPhone, his medic bag.
At Christmas, Operation Santa Claus provided the family with presents, one for each child.
Aiken limped from office to office to press his case to an unyielding bureaucracy. With short-term and long-term memory loss, he struggled to keep appointments and remember key dates and events. His PTSD symptoms alienated some staff.
"He would have an outburst ... (and) they would treat him as if he was like a bad soldier," says Monica. "They weren't compassionate."
They were also wrong. The money the military took back from Aiken resulted from accounting and other errors, and it should have been his to keep. Further, the Defense Department didn't return the bulk of the money to Aiken until after Reuters inquired about his case.
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| Shawn Aiken, seen with his family,was injured by an RPG in 2010,which left him with a crushed left hip and a traumatic brain injury. |
The Pentagon agency that identified the overpayments, clawed them back and resisted Aiken's pleas for explanation and redress is the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, or DFAS (pronounced "DEE-fass"). This agency is responsible for accurately paying America's 2.7 million active-duty and Reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
It often fails at that task, a Reuters investigation finds.
A review of individuals' military pay records, government reports and other documents, along with interviews with dozens of current and former soldiers and other military personnel, confirms Aiken's case is hardly isolated. Pay errors in the military are widespread.
And once mistakes are detected, getting them corrected — or just explained — can test even the most persistent soldiers.
Reuters found multiple examples of pay mistakes affecting active-duty personnel and discharged soldiers.
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 computer systems for payroll and accounting, many of them decades old, long obsolete, and unable to communicate with each other.
In a December 2012 report on Army pay, the Government Accountability Office said DFAS and the Army have no way to ensure correct pay for soldiers and no way to track errors.
These deficiencies, it said, "increase the risk that the nearly $47 billion in reported fiscal year 2011 Army active duty military payroll includes Army service members who received pay to which they were not entitled and others who did not receive the full pay they were due."
In a written response to the report, Robert Hale, the Defense Department's comptroller, said, "I agree that we need to strive to improve payroll accuracy," but added that the GAO had overstated the problem and mischaracterized some of the debts as errors.
TANGLE OF RECORD KEEPING
Former soldiers have had their civilian wages and their Veterans Administration benefits garnished. They have been pursued by private collection agencies and forced to pay tax penalties. In other cases, too, deserters have continued to be paid for months, and sometimes years, after disappearing.
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| US Army medic Shawn Aiken stands in front of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. |
The Pentagon's record-keeping tangle not only increases the potential for errors; it also forces DFAS to depend heavily on "manual workarounds," another source of errors.
Neither the Pentagon or DFAS or the military services can specify how many workers are used to handle these tasks, but "it takes a massive amount of human effort," says Roy Wallace, an Army assistant deputy chief of staff.
One sort of workaround was a main reason for Aiken's hardships at Fort Bliss. Injured by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan, Aiken was eventually sent to an Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.
Upon arrival there, he should have been designated as a "wounded warrior," a status that would have automatically forgiven all debts related to the overpayments DFAS later claimed and entitled him to benefits he didn't receive.
Lacking a unified, automated system to process soldiers arriving from combat zones, DFAS had to post staff at Landstuhl to do the work in person, by hand — but only for those soldiers arriving by air. Aiken, who had already moved with his unit from Afghanistan to another location in Germany, arrived by bus.
"We're not out to screw our own people," said Defense Department Comptroller Hale, to whom DFAS reports. "The military pay system is just very complex."
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| US Army medic Shawn Aiken treats Iraqi security guards whose vehicle was struck by an IED. |
DFAS said pay errors are extremely rare. 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.
But a spokeswoman for the Defense Department inspector general and a senior GAO official said their respective offices hadn't audited the overall accuracy of DFAS pay in the past five years.
When soldiers seek explanations about pay problems, getting answers is tough. It's hard for DFAS to find answers, too. One of the fundamental flaws in military payroll accounting is that DFAS handles pay, but each branch of the services handles personnel data on which pay hinges.
That disconnect leads to errors. And it means the agency must submit requests to personnel staff at the relevant service when it wants questions answered. The wait can take weeks or longer.
DFAS debt notices tell soldiers to address any questions or challenges to the agency. But DFAS admits it often doesn't investigate errors.
NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT
Shawn Aiken's combat tours began in August 2005, when he was deployed with the 172nd Stryker Brigade to Mosul, Iraq. In 2006, the Army awarded Aiken an Army Commendation Medal for saving three lives in two days of combat in Iraq.
In 2010, after re-enlisting, Aiken was in Afghanistan when his armored vehicle struck an anti-tank mine; he suffered a concussion and neck and back injuries. Later that year, a rocket-propelled grenade blasted him through the air and head-first onto hard ground.
Weeks later, Aiken's unit was transferred to Schweinfurt, Germany, where he began visiting Landstuhl for treatment.
At that point, everyone familiar with Aiken's case agrees, he should have been designated a "wounded warrior." That status entitles soldiers to receive special pay while hospitalized or in "warrior transition units."
Most debts to the military are to be canceled. And the exemption from income taxes for soldiers in combat zones is extended while hospitalized.
But Aiken was taking a bus on his visits to Landstuhl. DFAS staff there, meeting wounded warriors as they arrived by air, never caught him in their system.
In October 2011, the Army — for "compassionate reasons" — transferred him to Fort Bliss, Texas. There he could be closer to Monica, a former soldier herself, and his two children with the wife he was divorcing, who live in El Paso.
Upon reaching Fort Bliss, Aiken was "in-processed" by DFAS personnel who, after reviewing Aiken's pay records, determined that he owed several thousand dollars to the Defense Department for earlier overpayments. They put through orders to dock his pay.
The DFAS personnel evidently never noticed that Aiken had not been given wounded warrior status.
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| U.S. Army combat medic Shawn Aiken lies down while getting an EKG at the VA Medical Center in El Paso, Texas, on May 24. |
DFAS spokesman Thomas LaRock said the agency has "no part in designating a soldier as a wounded warrior." In the Aiken's case, he said, the responsibility rests with the Army Medical Department.
Margaret Tippy, a spokeswoman for the Army Medical Department, said she could "say with certainty" that her department doesn't have such responsibility.
It wasn't until February 2012 that Aiken's nurse case manager noticed he wasn't listed as a wounded warrior. On February 27, he was officially declared one.
In March, he received small reimbursements for meals. But his pay didn't reach normal levels until June 2012, and he still wasn't reimbursed for most of the money withheld in previous months.
Reuters first asked DFAS about Aiken's case in September 2012. In response, the agency reviewed his records and, in mid-November, sent a summary that detailed 14 errors related to the claw-backs.
DFAS declined to provide a figure for the total amount of debt it collected from Aiken. An analysis by Reuters of Aiken's pay records shows that from October 2011 through March 2012, DFAS withheld more than $4,700 from his pay.
Aiken says he believes that since the pay review prompted by Reuters, DFAS has now fully repaid him. It hasn't.
DFAS said that since October 2012, it has reimbursed Aiken $1,818.31. That amount, plus $490.25 in meal reimbursements he received in March, brings the total repaid to Aiken to only $2,308.55.
Today, Aiken and Monica, who married last year, live in a small stucco house near Fort Bliss. After two surgeries, Aiken spends most of his days on the base, receiving treatment and counseling. He still has nightmares, flashbacks, chronic pain and other symptoms.
