Army Reserve soldiers may have to wait an extra couple of weeks to get paid for attending their monthly battle assembly in December.
The delay — which is averaging about 17 days — is caused by a glitch in the Regional Level Application Software, said Lt. Col. William Ritter, a spokesman for the Reserve. The RLAS has many functions, including processing pay and orders, as well as transactions such as soldier transfers, awards and promotions, he said.
"All functions are slowed," Ritter said. "Anything that RLAS would have handled is now being done in an alternate manner."
This includes, in some cases, manual processing. For example, soldiers are being asked to sign in when they get to their monthly drill, and those rosters are then sent to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, where they're processed and manually inputted into the Defense Finance and Accounting Service system, Ritter said.
"We're bypassing the RLAS system while the technical issues are being addressed," he said.
Reserve soldiers currently mobilized and deployed overseas should not be affected, Ritter said.
Mobilizing soldiers must have their initial orders inputted into RLAS, but once they are on active duty, they are paid via a different system, he said. The Reserve did not mobilize any soldiers in December, since RLAS has been down, and the next mobilizations aren't scheduled until February, he said.
Issues with the RLAS first came to light in early December, and the Reserve's technicians are trying to figure out the cause for the glitch, Ritter said.
"At this point, it's not known what caused it to stop functioning properly," Ritter said, adding that it's too early to know when the RLAS might be up and working again.
To keep soldiers informed, Ritter said the Army Reserve has sent multiple messages out to the force.
"We're letting them know from multiple avenues that their pay might be delayed," he said.
Michelle Tan is the editor of Army Times and Air Force Times. She has covered the military for Military Times since 2005, and has embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Haiti, Gabon and the Horn of Africa.
