Wounded soldiers too often find themselves having to battle the Army over pay mistakes
Having nearly lost his life in Iraq, the 1st Infantry Division soldier became lost to the Army payroll system because of a paperwork snafu as he lay comatose in a veterans hospital near Chicago. As a result, an Army bureaucrat classified him as absent without leave and cut off his pay, as is sometimes done when the system loses track of a soldier. The theory is that a GI wrongly listed as AWOL will start shouting and then the issue can be resolved. "That may work for an able-bodied soldier," says Michael Hurst, a former Army finance officer, "but it doesn't work so well for a guy in a coma in Chicago."
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The problems result in part from the military's reliance on separate finance, medical, and personnel databases. The current system, designed in the 1970s, is so antiquated that sometimes data on a particular soldier must be manually extracted from one database for use in another. The Defense Department is trying to create a combined system, but the project has fallen behind because of the sheer complexity of the task.
Why am I not surprised to find that the system is that old. When I started reading this article the first thing that popped into mind was "why aren't their systems networked together in real time". It seems simple, a doctor signs in a patient, the information is sent to the main office and everything can be accessed by the soldiers SSN. I imagine this will be the case soon as these errors become more and more common.
