The military medical community, battling shortages in psychiatrists, critical care nurses and other professionals needed during a time of war, will be the first in the Department of Defense to use special pay authorized by Congress nearly a year ago.
Others — including nuclear and aviation, the enlisted force and the officer force — will see the department’s schedule for moving them under new special pay ceilings in a report due to Congress by Jan. 31.
Pay experts long have criticized the hodge-podge of more than 65 special and incentive pay programs enacted over the decades, many of them with payment levels and eligibility requirements spelled out in statute.
The rigidity of that practice became a very obvious problem for the services as they went to war in two theaters with an all-volunteer force and found that their mix of skills had to be reshaped quickly to meet war needs.
The enemy’s use of improvised explosive devices, for example, and the length of current conflicts that sent troops back to Iraq and Afghanistan again and again, has created a need for more psychiatrists and psychologists to diagnose and treat post-traumatic stress disorder.
Likewise, the demand for seasoned Special Forces personnel left another pay challenge for operational command. It wasn’t until January 2005 that Congress finally approved a Critical Skills Retention Bonus, a one-time payment of up to $50,000, to be offered to retain combat-hardened Army sergeants first-class with 19 to 25 years of service.
Before enacting the pay plan last January, Congress made a few adjustments. In the main, however, it embraced the concept of moving those 65 or so individual salaries under eight broad categories of special pay authority where they can be adjusted and applied as the services deem fit. Congress merely must be given 30 days notice before changes take effect.
“There is more flexibility within these pays now where they can use them to meet requirements,” said Vee Penrod, director of military compensation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
She contrasted the new authority to the traditional “cumbersome” practice of the Department of Defense or individual services asking Congress to enact a new special pay or to adjust a salary, which routinely took two years to execute.
Those 65 special pay programs aren’t going away. They merely will be easier to adjust and to manage, Penrod explained.
Plans are to begin to use these new authorities gradually as the Secretary of Defense, working with the services, develops each category. Defense has 10 years to shift all special pays under the new flexible authorities, but it must present Congress with a plan and schedule for doing so by Jan. 31.
First up will be the medical community, which already has notified Congress it seeks new bonuses for at least four medical officer specialties, and wants to shift all medical officer accession and retention bonuses under the consolidated bonus authority, with its higher pay ceilings, by fiscal 2010.
Those ceilings on routine accession bonuses offered to officer health professionals will be $30,000 a year. But for critical wartime specialties, the new ceiling will be $100,000 a year. Multi-year accession bonuses under laws to be replaced by the new authorities cannot exceed a total of $200,000 for dentists and $30,000 for pharmacists and registered nurses.
The ceiling on retention bonuses will rise from $50,000 a year for medical and dental officers to $75,000 a year. Retention bonuses for optometrists and pharmacists could be raised up to the same $75,000 ceiling. Their retention bonus limit now is $15,000 a year.
Once the services are operating under the new authority and caps, said Penrod, “They can say, ‘All right, what do I need to do here to attack this particular retention issue.’ That was the whole point of doing this.”
To comment, e-mail milupdate@aol.com, write to Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, VA, 20120-1111 or go to militaryupdate.com.
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