WAITING GAMES

Fighting DFAS and the CID is alot like fighting the IRS or and insurance company. They wear you down. They have 30 - 45 days to respond to a congressional inquiry. They wait until the last minute to respond. We get passed around from person to person. We get answers that have nothing to do with the question we asked. If the CID decides that an activated reservist has "falsified" a travel claim, they will take ALL their travel pay.

Here's an example of one case of alleged travel fraud by an activated reservist. The soldier was found NOT guilty of any fraud by JAG. The soldier later finds out that CID determined that he had committed fraud, so they picked out several months of his claims to investigate. They said he had, in fact submitted a fraudulent claim, therefore they said he owed the gov't ALL the money for the time period investigated. Now, here is where it gets murky. Now what does the soldier do? Doesn't he have a right to know what claim was fraudulent? What makes it fraud and not an accident - miscalculation? Doesn't he get to defend himself? Well, to be honest I don't know the answer to these questions because we are still waiting to find out. See, they (CID, DFAS and the GOV'T) gets to start collection while the soldier is trying to find out the answers to those questions. Did the soldier claim 60.00 but didn't have a receipt? If every other claim for 2 years were right, why would they take ALL of his travel pay? Why not charge him the $60.00? How can they take back food allowances - those are standard and automatically in your pay?

I am not saying that all the soldiers that are being investigated are innocent. I am saying that the soldiers that are being investigated are not given any rights to defend themselves. There are double standards everywhere. For example, a different soldier couldn't find a receipt for a class he took. DFAS said he needed the receipt or he owed the money back. He couldn't find the receipt, he let them take the money back from his next check. The Army called that an "error". Why was that an error but the other was fraud?