{"id":66587,"date":"2016-06-28T14:02:19","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T18:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=66587"},"modified":"2016-06-28T14:02:19","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T18:02:19","slug":"pentagon-bomb-techs-in-debt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=66587","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon bomb techs in debt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Lamothe at the Washington Post<\/a> tells the story of how the bomb techs at the Pentagon were overpaid, despite what they were told when they were hired, and were tossed in tens of thousands of dollars in debt;<\/p>\n

In January 2015, members of the Pentagon\u2019s bomb squad got some financially devastating news: They had been overpaid for years, the Defense Department informed them, and the government wanted the money back \u2014 all of it.<\/p>\n

For some bomb technicians, that meant they had suddenly accrued debts of up to $173,000. And going forward, defense officials also told them, their annual pay would be cut by 25 percent.<\/p>\n

All because of what the government described as a clerical error that the Pentagon bureaucracy itself \u2014 not the bomb squad members \u2014 had made.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bomb techs thought they were getting hazardous duty pay. Some moved to DC to work the job for what they thought were higher wages – some are saying that they wouldn’t have taken the job if they’d known that remuneration was substantially less than what they had signed on for. But, the Feds work under different rules than those they force on the private sector.<\/p>\n

The case has little comparison in the private sector, said Catherine Fisk, an employment-law professor at the University of California at Irvine. While most employees working on an \u201cat-will\u201d basis can be fired or have their pay cut with little notice, there isn\u2019t a legal basis under which a company could recoup money it had promised to pay unless the employees did something clearly improper or illegal such as filing false expense reports, she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lamothe reports that teammates claim that one tech, Axel Fernandez, one of the first hired to the unit, committed suicide because of the $136,000 debt;<\/p>\n

Fernandez\u2019s job offer letter, dated September 2008, said his base pay was $69,081, with a Washington-area cost-of-living supplement of $14,431, bringing the total to $83,512. With an additional 25 percent in hazardous-duty pay, the letter said, he would receive $104,390 annually.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, when I enlisted in the Army, I initially enlisted for three years. In those heady days following AIT, the drill sergeants offered us a chance to extend enlistments for a year for $2500 ($11,400 in 2016 dollars), so, you know, I figured what the hey. Well, four years later, after I’d done the year, some civilian figured that the bonus was paid in error. He couldn’t find the DA message that authorized the payment, and the Army decided that they wanted their money back, you know, even though I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain. <\/p>\n

Working for the Feds has it’s pit falls.<\/p>\n

Thanks to David for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Lamothe at the Washington Post tells the story of how the bomb techs at the … Pentagon bomb techs in debt<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[237],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-pentagon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66587","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66587\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}