nprfreshair: Scot Paltrow tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies about the military payroll debacle that happ
nprfreshair: Scot Paltrow tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies about the military payroll debacle that happened to Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker: He was a four-star general who actually retired and when the Iraq War started, Secretary of Defense [Donald] Rumsfeld persuaded him to come back to active duty to be the Army Chief of Staff, which is the highest military rank in the Army, and so he duly signed on and came back to serve his country and discovered very quickly that he wasn’t getting paid. And it turned out that he had been on the retirement payroll, and he was correctly removed from the retirement payroll. However, the retirement payroll computers were set automatically to believe that when someone was removed from them the reason was that they had died and so the computers sent out a computer-generated condolence letter to his wife on his death, but of course he was very much alive. And meanwhile it took months for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service to straighten things out so that he could put back onto the active duty payroll, and then additional months before he was paid the money that he hadn’t been paid when he first started.“ -- source link