Throwback Thursday: Army Members Had $150M in Unpaid Bills
From 1980 to 1986, the U.S. Army allowed former service members to slip away with unpaid bills totaling $150 million – over $415 million in 2023 dollars – for things like unpaid bar tabs and reenlistment bonuses they didn’t deserve.
Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, awarded the Army his Golden Fleece Award for this egregious lack of accountability and oversight.
According to Proxmire, not only did the Army lose track of tens of millions of dollar’s worth of expenses members owed it, but it also refused repayments from former service members that tried to settle their debts.
Citing a General Accounting Office report, Proxmire details how one former service member owed $942 to the Army, but returned an unsigned affidavit claiming he had no money, family, or assets and couldn’t pay it back. The Army wrote off his debt despite having documentation he had a family, $23,000 a year salary, and a $70,000 house.
In another case, a soldier discharged due to drug use was required to pay back his $973 reenlistment bonus for not serving out his full term. The soldier offered to pay back $5 a month until it was paid off, but the Army simply closed his case and wrote off his debt. In another case, the Army offered a $50 per month payment plan to a debtor, who then never made a payment. That debt was also written off, according to Proxmire.
Other stories detail similar cases of the Army skirting official policy to discharge large amounts of debt at its discretion. Its official policy was already lax, giving service members that had less than $600 in debt and that didn’t respond to their mail and automatic write off.
If you owe money to a landlord, a private company, or a bank, you must pay it back, or else they’ll send it to collection and force you to pay it back. If you owed money to the Army, however, you got blanket forgiveness courtesy of the taxpayer.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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