Well, I may have solved the mystery of why some military folks weren't paid early yesterday...the U.S. Coast Guard Pay and Personnel Center blog has a posting from yesterday that explains that a new pay policy means that Coast Guard folks aren't likely to see their military pay before payday.
The Department of Treasury's Financial Management Service (FMS) Kansas City Provides Payment, Collections and Financial Reporting services to the U. S. Coast Guard. FMS has recently undertaken a number of modernization efforts. One of these efforts is called Payment Application Modernization (PAM) which will help FMS process agency payment requests in a more efficient and cost effective manner.What does this mean for Coast Guard members? Effective with 15 February pay day, FMS Kansas City will not release payments to the Federal Reserve Bank until the evening prior to pay day. This means that most banks will not have your payment posted until the morning of the actual pay day and some of the smaller banks and credit unions may not have monies posted until later in the day.
Not good news, but at least some sort of explanation. From the comments, it seems that the Coast Guard pay folks were just as surprised as the rest of the service members. What a mess!
For my Coast Guard readers, you might want to make sure that your direct debits are set up a few days after payday, just to be sure that there aren't any surprises in the future.
