WASHINGTON – As many as 95 percent of Army reservists called to active duty during the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts have experienced problems with their military pay, according to an audit report the Government Accountability Office released Monday.

The problems included underpayments, overpayments and late payments, as well as a month’s delay or more in reservists receiving their tax exemption benefits.

“The processes and automated system relied on to provide active duty pay, allowances and tax benefits to mobilized Army Reserve soldiers are so error-prone, cumbersome and complex that neither (Defense Department) nor, more importantly, Army Reserve soldiers themselves, could be reasonably assured of timely and accurate payments,” the GAO report said.

It took some soldiers more than a year to straighten out their pay problems, the report said.

“These pay problems often had a profound adverse impact on individual soldiers and their families,” the study said. “Soldiers were required to spend considerable time, sometimes while deployed in remote, hostile environments overseas, seeking help on pay inquiries or in correcting errors.”

The survey blamed the troubles in part on insufficient resources allocated to key unit-level pay offices, inadequate training on proper procedures and “poor customer service.”

Defense Undersecretary Tina Jonas said the Defense Department concurred with the findings and would implement the 15 recommendations that the GAO, Congress’s investigative arm, made to fix the problems. “The DoD … is already taking actions to correct the noted deficiencies,” she said in a letter to the GAO.

The investigative agency said it audited the cases of 348 reservists mobilized during the 18-month period from August 2002 through January 2004 and found that 332 of them had encountered pay problems.

The soldiers audited belonged to eight diverse reserve units, including a Michigan surgical unit, a Maryland military police company, a Connecticut military intelligence detachment and a Pennsylvania chemical detachment.

“Potentially hundreds of DoD, Army and Army reserve organizations and thousands of personnel were deficient,” the report said.

The GAO, formerly known as the General Accounting Office, found that 294 of the 348 soldiers audited were underpaid and 245 received late pay. Five soldiers with the Maryland military police company were underpaid and seven did not receive their last overseas housing allowance until more than two months after their active-duty tour ended.

Forty-nine soldiers with a North Carolina quartermaster company did not receive their hardship duty pay for three months after arriving overseas, but then continued to receive the special pay for five months after departing their overseas assignments.

Overpayments totaled $247,000 to 256 soldiers, the report found. One soldier with the MP company turned to the GAO for help after failing to get the Defense Department to stop making about $52,000 in active-duty payments to him after he was demobilized, according to the report.

The GAO’s recommendations included a study on the feasibility of creating an ombudsman with responsibility for all reservists’ pay problems; the possible creation of a system that automatically would stop the withholding of taxes from all soldiers serving in tax-exempt hazardous-duty zones; and monthly reviews of reservists’ pay records.

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(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-08-23-04 2056EDT