Summary: As part of an effort to determine whether executive departments and agencies have adequate accounting control over payroll systems, a review was made of the Joint Uniform Military Pay System/Manpower Management System. The system is the combination of the former Marine Corps Joint Uniform Military Pay System and the Manpower Management System. The primary purposes of the automated system were to provide: adequate service to members; the maximum practicable uniformity between the services; centralized and computerized pay account maintenance; and optimum support of planning, programming, and budgeting systems.
The Marine Corps spent millions of dollars in developing, implementing, and operating the system. However, records of these costs were not kept and procedures for measuring system effectiveness were never established. Therefore, Marine Corps and Defense management do not know how much has been spent, what economic benefits have been gained, or to what extent system goals and objectives have been met. Since the System is not reliable enough to centrally compute pay accurately, extensive and inefficient manual procedures are followed to verify the accuracy of pay. As a result, manual procedures, rather than the automated system, constitute the real pay system. There are basic system weaknesses on the part of management which need to be corrected.
