Source: United States Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND)
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WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND) discussed the Army’s personnel payment system at a Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearing with Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Army Chief of Staff General James McConville. Senator Cramer also expressed gratitude to Secretary Wormuth and General McConville for their cooperation in fixing a personnel pay issue for a North Dakota constituent last year.
“I was struck by how many times you stated the most important part of the Army, of course, are the people. You speak with great affection, passion, and sincerity about it. Secretary Wormuth, you and I got to know each other early on working with your team to fix this pay problem. It highlighted a broken system. The new integrated personnel pay system which I became familiar with through that process was supposed to be fixed last year, but I’m told it’s still struggling to roll out properly. Can you give me an update on that and tell us if there’s anything we can do to help? When I look at the big employers in the world today – obviously, the military is one of those and the Army specifically – there are much bigger companies that don’t seem to have these same sort of problems,” said Senator Cramer.
“We’re working very hard on [Integrated Personnel and Pay System – Army] (IPPS-A), which the National Guard is already able to use some of the features of that personnel system. We are working very hard to be able to roll out the next increment of IPPS-A release three, hopefully later this fall. We feel like we will be on schedule for that,” responded Secretary Wormuth. “Frankly, we are working very aggressively with the contractor to make sure that they’re able to meet what we’ve asked them to do, and that next release will bring out some of the talent management features, enable people to look at what assignments are available, and then it will be the next increment, as I understand it, that will really provide the pay transparency across all components.”
“Right now we have what we call an industrial age personnel management system,” said General McConville. “We treat everybody as interchangeable parts. We have three different personnel systems for our regular Army, our National Guard, and Reserve. Quite frankly, it’s no way to run a railroad. We need to have everyone on the same system… We have tremendous talent in the Army that’s masked by a person’s grade, and their [Military Occupational Specialty]… we’ve got a lot of work to do in this and as we manage the future, we could compete for talent. We’re going to have to manage soldiers’ talents to get the best in the Army.
Senator Cramer highlighted the importance of this system to modernize the Army and attract and retain the best military talent.
“You’re both very fluent on the importance of modernization and the priorities or modernization. It seems that this would be a really high priority, not as sexy looking, but when we’re talking about challenges, recruitment, retainment, and getting the best of the best this will be important. I encourage you to stay at it. Keep us informed and if there’s anything we need to do from a policy standpoint or oversight standpoint, anything that helps you with the contractor or anyone else, please reach out,” said Senator Cramer.