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The Pentagon recently asked nearly 10,000 soldiers to repay excessive bonuses they were given for re-enlisting in the California National Guard between 2007 and 2009 amid the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Congress was notified of the problem in 2014, but representatives failed to pass a provision that would allow the Defense Secretary to waive the repayments.
Some representatives claim that the California National Guard failed to convey the scale of the repayments issue or make it a congressional priority. An outraged and bipartisan group of legislators have called for quick action and full forgiveness of the overpayments (estimated to be around $70 million). On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and President Obama have promised to resolve the issue, even as officials acknowledge that the issue may extend to other states:
President Obama has told the Defense Department to expedite its review of nearly 10,000 California National Guard soldiers who have been ordered to repay enlistment bonuses improperly given a decade ago, but he is not backing growing calls for Congress to waive the debts, the White House said Tuesday. The comments by White House spokesman Josh Earnest suggest the administration is running into legal and policy roadblocks as it struggles to handle a public relations headache for the Pentagon, the National Guard and members of Congress who were caught off guard by the scope of the problem.
[...] California Guard officials say they informed California lawmakers about the scale of the debts in 2014, telling them in a list of legislative priorities sent to each House office and the House Armed Services Committee that "thousands of soldiers have inadvertently incurred debt, through no fault of their own because of faulty Army recruiting or accounting practices."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday October 27 2016, @01:56PM
There is surely no legal basis for demanding a repayment.
Depends. I'd bet they likely signed some contract that said, "To receive this bonus, you agree that the following conditions are true...." or something to that effect. If they did so, the government may have the legal justification to take the money back, since clearly these folks didn't qualify for those conditions.
But, if they were misled by recruiters, I agree that it's not the MORAL thing to do.
You go to a recruiter, whose job it is to know what he's doing. He tells you: sign here, and you get $10k. You sign. You get $10k. Contract fulfilled.
The fact that the recruiter screwed up is not your fault.
Agreed. Well, you missed one important step: "You sign. You get $10k. You go risk your life in service of country, possibly for a couple years in a foreign warzone. Contract fulfilled." That's the truly horrible part about all of this: we're asking people who made significant sacrifices on behalf of the country as a whole to upend their finances and pay back money that was promised to them in exchange for that service. How many of them would NOT have signed up to re-enlist without those bonuses?
Even setting aside cases where the soldier took the bonus because he/she needed that money immediately (e.g., for a family crisis or something), it's important to keep in mind that active duty pay when a National Guard soldier is deployed is not necessarily a lot. The National Guard is great when it's not being pulled into service to fight foreign wars -- a little extra cash for some weekend drills, etc. But if you know there's a significant possibility that you might be pulled back into active duty and deployed, you're looking at upending your life AND living on the active duty salary. A $10,000 bonus for a low-ranking soldier might be equivalent to an extra half a year's pay, and it might be the only thing that makes it feasible to consider doing this.
Unless, of course, you knowingly misrepresented your situation to receive a bonus that wasn't due to you. While it seems to be a small minority of cases, it did happen here. From TFA:
"However, many of the soldiers who received the bonuses acted on good faith resulting from bad information; some, however, knowingly committed fraud" read the California Military Department statement.
Six California Guardsman, including the person who ran the bonus program, served jail time for their involvement in fraudulently issuing payments to Guardsmen who did not qualify for the payments. Another 40 were punished administratively for collusion in receiving payments they were not entitled to receive.
This is about the only situation where I think it's reasonable to take the money back. If you lied or misrepresented your situation, or you otherwise knowingly did something to obtain money that wasn't due to you, then yes, you should not only give it back, but likely be charged with something for committing fraud.
For the rest, sorry -- it's too late. These guys already did their service. You can't change the terms of their contracts now. If they found these errors shortly after they happened and offered the guys a chance to rescind their remaining service obligation when they took the money back, then maybe. But it's too late now. Well, it's the federal government, so of course they can make it legal to do so. But it's not the morally correct decision.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Francis on Thursday October 27 2016, @02:41PM
The correct thing to do here is to invent a time machine and go back and renegotiate the deal.
Since we don't have time machines, perhaps we could just pay the money and then claw it back from the defense contractors that are so fond of wasting money on things like those huge bundles of shrink wrapped cash that go missing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday October 27 2016, @03:53PM
and then claw it back from the defense contractors that are so fond of wasting money on things like those huge bundles of shrink wrapped cash that go missing.
You have to know where the cash went first. And as I was telling Phoenix666, I can with similar level of justification say that it's your problem to come up with the money. Those bills didn't come out of thin air, someone from the federal government sent them over and then ceased to care about where they went.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday October 28 2016, @04:09AM
No, you don't, you have to know who was responsible for that and make them pay.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:56PM
They basically pulled this on the Revolutionary Army vets who returned from the war only to have the merchants of America (who many of them were indebted to since they were mostly subsistence farmers) demand repayment since trade with Europe came to a halt over the merchants defaulting on THEIR many loans from countries antagonistic to Britain who helped financially support the colonies departure from the Crown.
Long story short: Many of those vets ended up in debtor's prison or destitute as a result of actions of both the merchants and government, who made unfavorable deals with European parties in order to win, then pushed the consequences of those deals onto the backs of the little people who weren't in a favorable position to argue against them.
People act like this is some amazing modern miscarriage of justice, but in reality it has been going on since more or less the founding of the country, much like the National Anthem, with some historical revisionism to help the plebs forget what it used to mean to be american in order to shore up the 'high ground' we claim to stand on.