Nearly 13,000 soldiers in the U.S. Army National Guard have gone months without receiving their sign-on bonuses. The bonus is one of the incentives in joining the Army National Guard, and it’s typically paid out in two installments. The first payment is received when a soldier’s training is complete and the second is sent halfway through a soldier’s contract.
However, 6% of eligible soldiers are still waiting for their bonus checks, including about 4,000 service members who have already completed their contracts and left the military.
The backlog has been a compiling problem for years. Some soldiers have been waiting for years to receive their bonus checks.
According to National Guard officials who spoke with Military.com, the issue stems from a flawed online payment processing system called Guard Incentive Management System. The system has crashed multiple times, and it has gone dark in two 10-month stints.
The system crashes forced staff to manually file bonuses, with some commanders resorting to jotting down reminders on dry-erase boards or on loose notes, according to the Military.com report. Bonuses that were as high as $20,000 became lost. Complicating the issue, officials now have to see who is still eligible to receive a bonus and who has become disqualified.
Officials say sign-up bonuses can be stripped over things like becoming overweight or receiving disciplinary action. Officials say they are working on fulfilling the bonuses and they encourage soldiers to bring lost bonuses to their commanders’ attention.
“Soldiers who are still in their unit who are fully qualified and have not received their bonus can alert their first-line leader and personnel service section to the issue so they can take action to get it resolved,” a National Guard official told Fox News Digital.
“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, told Military.com.
According to the Army Times, military records show a Pentagon server fire caused the online payment system to crash in 2018 and hasn’t performed the same since. State-level incentive managers still use that system and manual entries to fulfill bonuses.
