South Korea: 14 Years in the Making, Part III.

On May 1st , 1998 my life began in earnest when I first stepped foot in Germany and discovered an

entirely new world than the only one I’d ever known. On May 1st , 2013 – exactly 15 years later, to the day – it ended. On that day I was notified that one of the big bosses needed to see me in his office with my supervisor. It’s never good when the big boss asks to see you in his office and it’s usually worse when he asks to see you with your supervisor. This meeting would certainly not be an exception and would alter the course of our lives considerably in many ways, all for the worse.

Most DoD civilians who work overseas receive a housing supplement which is called Living Quarters Allowance (LQA). It basically pays for your rent and utilities, employees don’t pocket any extra money from it. When you receive a job offer from an overseas position, they have an LQA cell whose job is to review your documents and ensure that you are qualified to receive LQA. When I got out of the Army in December 2004 (here in Vicenza), I was lucky enough to find a job here as a contractor for Northrup Grumman. After a little over a year, the contract was getting cut and I needed to find a job. NG found me another job within the company but the only one I was qualified for was in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Now that might sound like a dream opportunity but when you factor in that the salary was only $50,000/yr with NO housing and NO base privileges…well, I wasn’t sure how we would survive in Hawaii on that but it was the only thing I had and with a wife and one year old at the time, I didn’t have much choice. Truthfully, I was even a bit excited at the prospect of finally getting to work in the Pacific theater anyway. However, about a month before we were supposed to leave for Hawaii, I got notified that I’d been selected for a DoD Civilian position up in Germany. Once they reviewed my paperwork and determined that I was eligible for LQA, I quickly informed Northrup Grumman that I was resigning and we made the move to Germany. Were all things equal, I would have taken the Hawaii job but the LQA made the decision to go to Germany an easy one, if only for financial reasons. And so in April 2006 I officially became a DA Civilian. As I mentioned earlier, we stayed two years and then relocated back to Vicenza where I also received LQA.

Fast forward to May 1st , 2013 and the aforementioned meeting with the big boss and my supervisor. He closed the door, sat down at his desk and clasped his hands in front of his mouth as if trying to figure out how to say what he had to say: the government, it seemed, had suddenly decided that the LQA regulations had been ‘misinterpreted’ by every overseas LQA cell around the world for the last 40+ years. They had recently conducted an audit of overseas personnel, applying the new interpretation, and identified almost 700 overseas employees who they claimed were erroneously found eligible for LQA. Because of this, those employees would have their LQA taken away and they would also have to repay every cent of LQA that they had received. Needless to say, I was one of the 700 and in my case, that meant that suddenly the government was telling me that I owed them about $200,000. I felt as if I’d been punched in the nuts. I left his office in a daze, not sure what to do. I was numb. I had rearranged my entire life working for the government based on being told I was eligible for LQA – how could they come back almost 8 years later and basically say “Oops, we made a mistake, we’re cutting you off and oh by the way, you owe us $200k”?! I went home and broke the news to my wife who was thoroughly perplexed at how the government could do something like this. The rest of that night remains pretty cloudy, all I can say for sure is that there was a lot of wine involved. I cannot tell you what a scary time that was for me. A wife and three kids and facing certain financial ruin, it felt like my life was over. I even briefly considered renouncing my US citizenship and moving to the beach house in the Philippines, such was the depths of my despair. I saw no way out. The DoD told us that if we submitted a waiver request, they would support it. What they didn’t tell us was that in submitting the waiver request, we would first have to sign a form admitting that this was a valid debt and that we were responsible for repaying it. Not only that, but the DoD has no authority to waive such ‘debts’; that authority rests with an office called the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA). If we submitted a waiver request and DOHA denied it, then they had a document with our signature on it admitting that we were legally responsible for repaying it, which meant we had no legal recourse.

I could write an entire book about the LQA audit nightmare and all the sordid details involved with it. One thing we knew for sure was that what the government did was at best disgusting and at worst,

criminal and illegal. But rather than go gentle into that dark night, a sizeable percentage of us decided to rage and try and fight the despicable action. We quickly organized and soon other affected employees from all over the world joined us. We had everybody on our side; 4 star generals were appealing to the Office of the Secretary of Defense on our behalf, the Commander in Chief of the VFW wrote to the OSD (and cc’d the White House) telling them in no uncertain terms that what they were doing to us was despicable. Soon the fight reached Washington DC as several Senators and Congressmen and women got involved on our behalf. We worked our asses off trying to force the government to do the right thing and it took its toll on me pretty bad. I look back on that year and wonder sometimes how I survived. Under the auspices of trying to make it look like they were doing everything to help, the government allowed us to keep LQA for 12 months in order to give us time to make arrangements to go back to the US. While this did help, the vast majority of us were still stuck overseas as the 12 month mark creeped closer and closer. There was a hiring freeze in the US and nobody was getting hired back there. Virginia and I talked about our options in case we were still here when they cut off our LQA and the best one we could come up with was for her and the kids to go stay at my mother’s house in the US while I sold pretty much everything we had and tried to find a cheap one bedroom apartment until such time that I got hired in the US somewhere (whenever that would be). I tried to explain the situation to my older kids so they wouldn’t get blindsided when the time came and they cried at the prospect of having to leave without daddy. It broke whatever semblance of a heart I had by that time.

Something else happened during that year that is integral to this story. One day, while searching the government jobs website looking for something to get me back to the US, I noticed that the job in Korea – the very one that I had wanted for so long – was open. It was the first time I had ever seen it posted but the timing could not have been any worse. Because of the LQA audit nightmare and the impending loss of my LQA, I could not afford to take the job even if I was able to get hired for it. Realistically it made no sense to even apply but in the back of my mind I thought why the hell not? Maybe we’ll get a miracle and the LQA crap will get overturned and I could take it if it got offered. So I did and forgot all about it. A few months later I got an email from a Major in Korea informing me that they had narrowed the list down to two people for that job and asking if I was still interested in the position. I was completely and utterly crushed. I emailed him back and let him know that I was sorry but I would be forced to withdraw from consideration because of the LQA audit. He said he understood – he had a few friends there who were also caught up in the audit and he told me he thought it was unconscionable what the government was doing to us. In a strange twist of fate, the Korea job ended up going to a very good friend of mine, who I had no idea I was even competing against. I was happy for him; if I could have it, at least it went to a good guy like him.

The DoD has a system called Priority Placement Program (PPP) that is supposed to help civilians find jobs in the US when their overseas tours are up. The way it works is that your resume and position description go into the system and when a job in the US opens up that matches it, they put you in that position. But the system is broke, as many people will tell you. Some people wait years to get picked up on PPP. I was already on PPP when the audit hit and originally I was hoping that I’d be one of the people who waited a few years to get picked up so I could stay in Italy longer but now, with my LQA getting cut off, I was desperate to get out of theater before the May 1st , 2014 deadline or we would be bankrupt within 6 months or so. We appealed to our elected officials to pressure the DoD to help us get back to the US and eventually they did just that in October, 2013 by releasing new guidance that all the LQA audit employees on PPP were to be given a priority 2 status, which meant that any job that closely matched our resumes were supposed to automatically go to us. It still wasn’t helping and by the end of January, I faced the real prospect of being stuck overseas when they cut off my LQA. Then one day several people sent me a link to a job posting in my career field. I read it and it matched my resume 100%. I angrily emailed my PPP rep at the personnel office and asked why I wasn’t matched to the job. Her answer was simply “Well, did you apply for it?”. I responded that I’m not supposed to HAVE to apply, I’m supposed to be MATCHED to the job automatically. It never even should have gotten posted to begin with. Her response - “Well I don’t know what to tell you” - sent me over the edge. I looked at the memo sent out by the OSD, got the email of the head guy in DC and emailed him directly. I told him I was one of the LQA audit employees who the government was screwing and demanded to know why I wasn’t matched to the job. He said he would look into it. He got back to me right away and said I was right, the system failed. He then informed me that they had frozen the position pending a quick investigation after which time I would be placed into it. True to his word, I was notified in late February that the job was mine. We had barely two months to get there before my LQA would be cut off and we made it with a mere 10 days to spare. We would be heading to South Carolina but by that time it didn’t matter if it was North Dakota or Timbuktu, all I cared about was that we were escaping just in time and would soon be leaving the nightmare of the past year behind.

Unfortunately, a whole new nightmare awaited us.


NOTE: If you'd like to read some news articles written about the LQA audit nightmare, here are a couple:
DOD civilians use 'strength in numbers' to fight LQA loss
US lawmakers getting involved in civilians' housing benefit fight