{"id":149081,"date":"2023-10-29T09:15:42","date_gmt":"2023-10-29T13:15:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=149081"},"modified":"2023-10-28T15:56:18","modified_gmt":"2023-10-28T19:56:18","slug":"national-guard-delinquent-with-paying-enlistment-bonuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=149081","title":{"rendered":"National Guard delinquent with paying enlistment bonuses"},"content":{"rendered":"

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At least 9,000 Soldiers are still waiting for their enlistment bonuses to be paid to them. Some have complained that they have not been paid in years. The National Guard also has found that 3,900 Soldiers completed their service and left the military without seeing their bonus payment. Some may have lost eligibility, but many simply did not see their payment. Although the National Guard strives to pay the initial part of the bonus within 30 days of the completion of initial service training, it is not codified. This leaves the Soldiers without the ability to reference policy to argue that their payment is late.<\/p>\n

From Military.com:<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The average time for receiving the first payment for a bonus is six months, Guard officials tell Military.com, though soldiers and families have reported that it can take years.<\/p>\n

The issue, according to officials, is the accumulated effect of undermanned, poorly trained or poorly performing full-time staff working with a payment-processing system that has faced multiple long-term catastrophic outages. That’s meant staff members have had to repeatedly track and process payments manually.<\/p>\n

The Army National Guard Incentive Management System, or GIMS, was first rolled out in 2012, allowing states to manage and monitor incentives. It was designed to streamline the process and mitigate fraud and abuse.<\/p>\n

But the system crashed in late 2018 and was inoperable for about 10 months; another 10-month outage occurred in 2021. While the system was down, bonuses had to be filed through a complicated manual process, creating a backlog that states are still trying to fix.<\/p>\n

“GIMS created some challenges for us,” one Guard official said. “Over the last couple of years, we’ve gotten through many of those hurdles, but it has attributed [sic] to overdue bonus payments.”<\/p>\n

Two adjutants general, top commanders in their respective states, described discovering their staff tracking enlistment bonuses on dry-erase boards or through email traffic and handwritten notes. In some cases, top brass became aware of the problem through soldiers using the so-called open door policy — skipping the chain of command to report issues. Some soldiers have escalated their issues through complaints to their representatives in Congress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Military.com has additional information here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At least 9,000 Soldiers are still waiting for their enlistment bonuses to be paid to them. … National Guard delinquent with paying enlistment bonuses<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[208],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-guard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}