SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. –
During the week of May 4 to 8, as migration of the Air Force Material Command workload to the Air Force Financial Services Center was taking place, AFFSC encountered a significant technical problem resulting in an immediate halt to all travel and military pay processing.
According to Air Mobility Command's Financial Management leadership, the cause is technically complex. However, the Defense Information Systems Agency and Secretary of the Air Force Office of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer experts have stated they believe this problem emerged as AFFSC reached its capacity on the number of concurrent users, while completely filling out the library storage capacity.
As soon as problems were noticed the chief financial managers from SAF/FMP and SAF/XC began diligently working to straighten out the issues. Collaboration included numerous teleconferences between all Air Force comptrollers and senior leaders.
As of May 11, a fix has not been found. However, it is being worked with utmost urgency and will continue to be until a resolution is found.
The vice chief of staff of the Air Force was briefed on this issue May 8.
AMC/FM is working closely with AFFSC to develop a temporary set of work around procedures that should allow for a limited set of documents, such as temporary duty advances and accrual payments for dependent members, to be transferred to AFFSC to be processed as the system will allow.
Additionally, procedures have been set up for high priority cases and sent to the wings for implementation May 11 and will remain in effect until the issues are resolved.
AMC is one of only two commands with responsibility for processing military pay documents, subsequently only travel voucher processing is impacted for AMC-serviced members. Within other commands both travel and military pay functions were transferred.
Air Mobility Command has operated under these interim procedures before, as faced with similar challenges during the first eight months of AFFSC operations, beginning March 2008. The familiarity to the situation enabled Charleston's Financial Services Office to being sending appropriate documents to AFFSC without delay May 11.
For more information contact 1st Lt. Matthew Schmit, 437th Comptroller Squadron financial services officer at 963-3723.