WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Oct. 14, 2004) -- A new pay system on the way should make pay for mobilized Army Reserve and National Guard Soldiers more timely and accurate.

The Forward Compatible Payroll, scheduled to go online in March, replaces a reserve pay system developed in the 1970s and will eliminate labor-intensive workarounds the current system requires, finance officials said.

“Commanders will tell you that three things impact Soldiers’ morale -- getting good food, getting mail from home and getting paid on time,” said Eric Reid, Army Defense Finance and Accounting Service liaison and chief of Finance & Accounting Oversight and Field Operations Division, Army Finance Command. “Soldiers and their families have a right to be paid timely and accurately. We have an obligation to ensure they are getting the entitlements Congress said they are due.”

The majority of pay issues in recent years isn’t one of not getting paid, Reid said, but mostly whether reservists are getting paid the correct amount when due.

A Government Accountability Office report that reviewed the pay of several National Guard special forces and military police units in Afghanistan between October 2001 and March 2003 found that in many cases Soldiers were not being paid all the entitlements they were authorized in a timely manner. A similar GAO review of a mix of Army Reserve units deployed both in Iraq and Afghanistan between August 2002 and January 2004 found more cases of overpayment than underpayment.

Chief among the causes for reserve pay issues is a reserve pay computer system originally designed to pay weekend drills and short periods of active duty, separate from both the personnel system and from the active-duty pay system. While good for paying weekend drills, it did not include automated options for payments of low-density entitlements or new entitlements authorized by Congress in recent years -- all requiring manual time-consuming workarounds, Reid said.

Low-density entitlements include items like high-altitude, low opening parachute duty or child support. New entitlements include Hardship Duty Pay Location and Continental U.S. Cost of Living Allowance.

Reid said the issue of underpayments from the GAO National Guard report was a combination of the finance system being overwhelmed with significantly more reservists who qualified for low-density entitlements and, early in the mobilization process, not enough finance personnel trained on the current reserve pay system.

“No organization has people sitting around idle for weeks or months at a time waiting for a customer to come through the door,” Reid said.

While FCP will eliminate the need for most workarounds when it comes online, finance hasn’t been waiting on it to make improvements to mobilized reserve pay. Additional finance personnel have been brought on board and trained to standard on the workarounds the current system requires, Reid said.

All mobilized reserve-component finance units now get an intensive block of instruction on current finance policies, Reid said. Teams from the reserve pay system at Fort McCoy, Wis., Army Finance and DFAS have conducted more than 60 training sessions and assistance visits in the past two years to ensure the field is up to speed, he said.

The overpayment issue identified in the GAO Reserve pay report is mainly an issue of personnel actions not making it into the finance system in a timely manner, Reid said. He explained that some Soldiers continued to receive entitlements that were authorized in theater, such as Hardship Duty Pay-Location, for months after they returned to the United States. That can mean a big debt back to the system once the overpayment is identified, he said. Much of this problem was eliminated in April of this year when HDP-L was fully automated in the pay system; however, timely notification of status changes is still critical to keeping pay accurate.

Part of the overpayment issue is unit administrators -- who work as federal civilians during the week and as reservists on drill weekends -- getting activated to do their military job, instead of unit administration. Unit administrators are the ones who input weekend drill information in the finance system and inform their servicing finance when personnel actions impact a Soldier’s pay.

About 20 percent of unit administration positions are currently vacant due to reserve unit activations, Reid said.

The Army Reserve is eyeing plans to pool unit administrators at higher levels than they are currently assigned so that somebody remains to cover necessary administration when a unit activates, and at the possibility of creating more military positions where the administrator continues to do the same job he does as a federal civilian, Reid said.

In the meantime, both the chief of the Army Reserve and the director of the Army National Guard have recently sent messages to commanders telling them to closely monitor the monthly commander’s pay management report to catch overpayments early.

FCP is not designed to link with the personnel system – meaning unit administrators or personnel offices will still need to inform the finance system when a personnel action, such as promotion or deployment to a hazardous location, impacts a Soldier’s pay.

Another system will take the improvements of FCP even further by integrating pay and personnel functions into a single system. The Defense Integrated Military Human Resources System, or DIMHRS, is scheduled to come online for the Army in fiscal year 2006, with other services to follow.

Army finance officials are working with DFAS, the Army Reserve and the National Guard on a 65-item action plan to improve reserve-component pay. Those points include implementing FCP, revising and updating various regulations and policies impacting pay and improved finance training. More than a third of the plan's actions have already been completed.

"As of July, 95.6 percent of all mobilized Reserve and National Guard Soldiers are getting pay within 30 days of being mobilized," Reid said. "That is an improvement over a year or two ago, but as I like to remind people, if you are one of remaining Soldiers having pay problems, you're not happy. We're still working to make it better."

Both the Army Reserve and the National Guard have activated hotline phone numbers for reservists experiencing ongoing pay issues that have not been resolved through normal channels in a timely manner. The Reserve number is 1-877-462-7782, and the Army National Guard number, 1-877-276-4729.

Soldiers experiencing pay problems should first use normal command and finance channels to resolve them and use the appropriate toll-free number only if the normal process is not getting problems fixed, Reid said.