Army Guard Revamping How It Doles Out Enlistment Bonuses After Tens of Thousands of Soldiers Went Unpaid

The Army National Guard is revamping its system that pays out enlistment bonuses, automating much of the process, after Military.com reporting revealed the service component has an extensive backlog of unpaid troops.

In October, Military.com reported that the service was behind in paying out thousands of soldiers' incentive bonuses, most of which are for their initial enlistment into the service component and can be up to $20,000. New reporting has shown the backlog was as high as 41,000 soldiers versus the initial tally of 13,000, though the Guard has since cut that number roughly in half.

Those bonuses are crucial to filling positions struck by the recruiting drought much of the military is suffering from. The Guard's bonus backlog was so severe that soldiers went years -- sometimes fulfilling entire enlistment contracts and leaving the service -- without seeing those checks.

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At the heart of the problem is the Army National Guard Incentive Management System, or GIMS, the online system that pays out the bonuses. Guard officials have reported that the platform is particularly unwieldy, even among government systems known for poor usability.

"Everyone wants to do the right thing, but the system itself is so cumbersome that it becomes very difficult," Col. Danielle MacDonnell, division chief of Army National Guard G1 operations, told Military.com.

It currently takes four people, from the unit through the state level, and 104 clicks to properly process a soldier's bonus and have it paid out, MacDonnell explained.

Military.com found instances of relevant staffing positions not being filled in some states. The publication also found that states rarely have backup staff to process payments -- meaning if one person in the chain is off work, or leaves the position, it's impossible to process a payment.

Those positions also often take months to fill, and new people generally need about a year to become competent with GIMS.

"This is an incredibly flawed process," MacDonnell added.

The so-called "GIMS 2.0" will make its debut with the North Carolina National Guard next week; in about a month, it will be in Arkansas. Guard officials hope to integrate all 54 states and territories by the end of the year.

The new process will require only two points of human contact: once when the soldier initially signs their contract, and then the United States Property and Fiscal Officer, or USPFO, will finalize the payment after the soldier fulfills their end of the deal.

The new process will effectively eliminate manual processing on the unit and state level, easing its historically decentralized nature and eliminating a hurdle multiple commanders in states have pointed to in interviews with Military.com.

States will still have staff to oversee incentives and serve as points of contact for soldiers who run into issues with a payment. However, those staff members will no longer have to manually handle enlistment and reenlistment bonuses.

GIMS is managed by Tiber Creek Consulting, which oversees several Department of Defense software and technology projects. The program was rolled out in 2012 following a fraud scandal in the California National Guard, though officials say the thick layer of safeguards, including all the manual interactions with payouts, may have been an overcorrection.

During the peak of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the California Guard sought to recoup $195 million in improperly paid out enlistment bonuses from about 17,000 soldiers. In some cases, those Guardsmen had recently returned home from being wounded on the battlefield. The California National Guard's incentives manager at the time, Master Sgt. Toni Jaffe, has since served a 30-month prison sentence after admitting to a court that she had illegally juiced up contracts for enlistees amid enormous pressure to fill recruiting quotas. The recoupment effort was eventually suspended.

Meanwhile, Guard officials have not yet been able to fully articulate the current enlistment bonuses backlog behind the scenes.

Military.com's initial reporting, based on data provided by the Guard, showed there were 13,000 unpaid soldiers. That number was revealed to be closer to 41,000 upon further review of the complicated backlog. Since January, the service component has whittled that total down to about 24,000 soldiers.

The backlog was particularly inflamed by two 10-month GIMS outages. The system crashed in 2018 due to a fire in the Pentagon's servers and again in 2021 in an unrelated incident.

However, MacDonnell explained that the suspected number of unpaid bonuses is unreliable, and something that has been difficult to determine. Since the Guard started to seriously examine its backlog, only 20% of those soldiers were actually eligible for their enlistment bonuses. Some violated their contracts, sometimes by moving to different states and taking up other roles in the service component, for example, or by having a disciplinary blemish on their record.

Further complicating that backlog are soldiers who may have already been paid their bonuses but are still being improperly counted as unpaid.

During the outages, some states paid troops through workarounds -- including delivering bonuses through the system that pays soldiers their regular duty pay, which is completely separate from GIMS. If a soldier received their bonus through the typical paycheck system, they would still appear in GIMS as unpaid.

Soldiers are typically awarded half of the bonus once they complete their initial training and the other chunk halfway through their contract. There is an informal goal of the bonus being paid within 30 days of those two windows, but that is not codified into policy.

"Soldiers need to be getting paid," MacDonnell said. "We're committed to seeing this through."

Related: The Army National Guard Owes Thousands of Former Soldiers Unpaid Bonuses. It's Asking Them to Figure It Out.