Federal Manager's Daily Report

Payments to mobilized Army National Guard have been untimely and inaccurate, the General Accounting Office has said.

It blamed the pay problems on a cumbersome and complex pay process not designed to handle the intricacies of active duty pay, as well as ineffective personnel strategies, aspects of a faulty system that have led to further difficulties in reenlistment and retention in two of the units GAO looked at.

The pay system is not well understood or consistently applied to determine the actions necessary to pay mobilized soldiers and it is unclear which organizations are responsible for key actions, said GAO. It also found a lack of resources devoted to pay processing, inadequate training for existing policies and procedures, and poor customer service.

The mix-ups often go straight to guardsmen’s families who rely on the checks and sometimes wind up having to work to correct the mistakes, so customer service was a key factor in GAO’s assessment.

DOD agreed with GAO’s report and is currently attempting to fix some of the problems.

www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-04-413T