Legacy Army Payroll Systems Buckle Under Weight of War

Computerworld - The war in Iraq has helped push antiquated U.S. Army payroll systems past their breaking point, leading to widespread problems for reservists, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report issued this month.
So severe are the problems caused by the aging, stand-alone Cobol-based mainframe systems that the GAO audit found that 95% of 348 mobilized reserve soldiers had at least one payroll problem. The glitches included both overpayments and underpayments, as well as delayed disbursements. Some troops had numerous payroll problems, and it took more than a year to correct some of them.
Both the system itself, called the Defense Joint Military Pay System-Reserve Component (DJMS-RC), and the attendant human processes are "so error-prone, cumbersome and complex" that the soldiers affected can't be assured of timely and accurate payment for duty served, said the GAO study. The result has been a "profound adverse affect on individual soldiers and their families," it said.
System Limitations
One major weakness stems from a lack of integration between the DJMS-RC and related U.S. Army personnel applications. The payment system was also hampered by processing limitations, requiring "significant manual effort" to make up for the shortcomings.
The GAO cited one case in which a soldier received an overpayment of $24,000 when a revocation of his mobilization status wasn't automatically reported to the payroll system due to the gaps between the personnel system and the DJMS-RC. And because of the DJMS-RC's computational limits, accounting for variables such as hardship duty requires manual input.
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), which oversees the DJMS-RC, has acknowledged that the system is "aging, unresponsive, fragile and a major impediment to efficient and high-quality customer service," according to the GAO.
Increased Risk of Error
A DFAS spokesman said the DJMS-RC's limitations were exacerbated by the war in Iraq; prior to the war, the system primarily handled pay for drilling exercises and not for the 12- or 18-month deployments now taking place in the Middle East. "Anytime a system requires human intervention, you increase the risk," the spokesman said.
Acknowledging the system's limitations, the Defense Department has launched a training program for support personnel and is rolling out an improved payroll system based on PeopleSoft Inc.'s PeopleSoft Enterprise, which will begin to go live next spring.
Once in place, the application will integrate the pay processes for reservists and active Army personnel and end the need for manual work-arounds while improving stability and eliminating many of the problems identified by the GAO, said the spokesman.
That system will laterbe phased out in favor of the larger Defense Integrated Military Human Resources Systems (DIMHRS), which was first announced in August 2001 and is also built on PeopleSoft .
While "significant design work has been completed" on the DIMHRS project, extensive testing will be required before implementation can begin, said Norma St. Claire, a DOD director of joint requirements and integration. Deployment to the Army, the first branch to go online, will start in the first quarter of 2006, she said. St. Claire added that while the DOD wants the software to be as "vanilla" as possible, "sometimes there are mission requirements that are not supported by the commercial product, and a few modifications will be needed."

Read more about ERP in Computerworld's ERP Topic Center.