Ch 13: Can the U.S. Army Reserve Pay Soliders Correctly?

1.) There were flaws that existed in the payroll system that caused some of the soldiers to get paid and some to not. The non-injured soldiers were receiving inaccurate paychecks with too little or too much money. The operations area of the Army was in need of help it was prone to many personnel system problems. There two systems DFAS and DJMS did not work conjunctively, leading to lots of errors such as the above mentioned. The errors were on going due to the fact that manual updates were occurring on a frequent basis. Due to the age of the system changes were out of the question, a new system was what was needed. A GAO study determined that 90% of the soliders that were in moblized units suffered from some sort of payroll issue, clearly something needed to be done!

There is no doubt that changes would be difficult but they were also necessary. The issues were in the organization, management and technical areas contributing to these systems. The areas of impact from these systems were at all levels. The human error was enormous due to the data entry happening at all levels and times. it was noted by the deputy secretary that leadership turnover caused a disconnect in awareness and program goals, this was the basis of many of the issues.

The army was also lacking the ever important organizational skills in their dept of payroll. They didn’t deny that this was an issue when confronted. The many technical and personnel issues aided in the destruction of the Army’s payroll system, these two entities did not work well together. This was due to the fact that the payroll systems were outdated and very hard to manage. The software that was being used was very rigid and sis not allow for easy changes to occur. Their new system, DIMHRS was funded but was three years behind its scheduling. It’s a wonder anyone got paid in the midst of all this mess.

FCP was a new system that was implemented as a interim solution. It used a web based browser to review and update files in the personnel database. There was a fail safe to keep information from being entered in duplicate, this helped with the data enrty errors. Microsoft SQL and Web browser software were needed to review the database documents. This temporary solution achieved a 97% success rate in the payroll dept.