Non-payment of Army officers' wages a 'purely administrative error'

THE DEPARTMENT of Defence has said it “deeply regrets” an administrative error that led to the non-payment of wages for some 1,300 officers in the Defence Forces.

A spokeswoman for the department said the payments, the February monthly wages, which were expected to be in the officers’ accounts yesterday would now arrive today.

Fine Gael defence spokesman Jimmy Deenihan called on the Taoiseach, who has assumed responsibility for the Department of Defence, “to ensure that an investigation is carried out into how such an enormous error could be made”.

The department’s spokeswoman said that it was a “purely administrative error”. It was “absolutely nothing to do” with the expanding work-to-rule in the public service.

Mr Deenihan said that when people were under such financial strain “it is inexcusable that a government department has been so inept as to fail to pay 1,300 officers”.

The Kerry North TD said that “officers had to discover for themselves that they had not been paid as nobody in the department saw fit to inform them of the monumental clerical error.”

The spokeswoman said a “very small data error” led to the non-payment, but it has since been corrected.

Mr Deenihan said the incident “follows a previous oversight where the department failed to forward monies deducted at source from officers’ pay to banks for loans that they had taken out. Again officers were never informed of this until they received irate calls from the various lending institutions”.