Biden Admin Owes Thousands of National Guard Soldiers Long Overdue Enlistment Bonuses: Report
The federal government owes thousands of National Guard soldiers enlistment bonuses, with some of the payments now being years late.
Military.com spoke to an unnamed source that it said was familiar with the unpaid bonuses, as well as several families who said they were still waiting for payments they’d been promised.
“I did my end of things, and this is a really bad introduction to the Army, not taking care of people,” one soldier told the outlet.
“I was really relying on this money to help with moving into a new place with my wife,” he said.
The military pays enlistment bonuses to entice Americans to serve. For the Army National Guard, bonuses of up to $20,000 form a “key part” of the attraction for many.
In many cases, half of the bonus is payable within 30 days of completion of the soldier’s initial training, with the other half coming at the midpoint of the soldier’s first term of enlistment.
However, those are guidelines, not rules, so soldiers don’t have much of a basis to complain.
Guard officials said that the “average time” for that first bonus payout is about six months, but even the military admits that more than one soldier in 20 hasn’t gotten the bonus he or she has been promised.
“While nearly 94% of our Soldiers eligible to receive an enlistment bonus have received it, we are working very hard to reconcile the remaining 6% because we hold ourselves to higher standards and believe one overdue payment to an otherwise eligible Soldier is one too many,” Col. Danielle MacDonnell, division chief, Army National Guard G1 operations, said in a statement to Military.com.
Officials blame the Army National Guard Incentive Management System, or GIMS, for much of the issue, although poorly trained staff also contributes to the problem.
The system is more than 10 years old and went completely offline for most of the year in 2018 and again in 2021.
That left personnel trying to track payments for tens of thousands of military personnel manually.
“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.”
That fact that most National Guard members serve only part-time limits their access to the staff members who would most likely be able to assist them, as well.
“The soldiers are frustrated. Of course … why would they stick around?” one state’s adjutant general, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, told Military.com. “Sometimes people have been lazy too. The soldier shouldn’t be coming to us … for their money. We should just pay our bills on time.”
Some soldiers have been told their states are out of money, the outlet reported, but bonuses are paid out of a central budget that state budgets have nothing to do with.
“There is frankly a lot of misinformation on the [unit] level,” the anonymous state adjutant general said. “It isn’t their fault, and it’s something I’m trying to fix.”
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