[kach22i]

Originally posted by legion
This, from the pro-military New York Times.

Kill the messenger, that will fix it.

EDIT: Different source............................

Many Military Deserters Still Got Paid
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,111877,00.html

WASHINGTON -- Congressional investigators have identified dozens of Army reservists and National Guardsmen who remained on the military's payroll and received checks totaling more than $900,000 despite failing to report for duty.

In a report released Monday, the Government Accountability Office said its "limited investigation... likely significantly understates" how much the military has paid deserters among the tens of thousands of reservists and guardsmen called to duty in recent years.

Reserve officials acknowledged they have no practical mechanism to compare payroll records to lists of troops classified as deserters so that checks can be intercepted before they're sent, the GAO said.

The findings expose "a serious fiscal vulnerability and an affront to those who do perform their often dangerous duties as ordered," said U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, R-11th District, chairman of the House Government Reform Committee.

Davis' committee has been scrutinizing the military's payroll systems for several years and had commissioned earlier GAO reports that found numerous instances of troops being underpaid or having their checks delayed for months as they were shifted to new units or new locations inside Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Army has acknowledged those problems, as well as the deserter pay spotlighted in the latest GAO report. The Pentagon's inspector general "generally concurred" with a GAO recommendation that the Army and reserves develop a strategy to ensure that payments are promptly stopped to troops identified as deserters, the new report said.

The GAO said it found a total of 75 reservists who were paid after deserting, focusing most closely on seven assigned to a quartermaster company based in Pennsylvania.

Those reservists, including one Virginia resident, were not named in the report. The GAO said that though they failed to report for duty as ordered in December 2003, six of the seven were paid until the following August, when GAO investigators called the payments to the Army's attention.

One of the soldiers continued to receive payments for eight additional months, collecting another $28,000, the report added. As of May 2006, none of the seven had been arrested for desertion, an offense that carries a prison term of up to 10 years.