Updates on DOD’s military-family moves

New complaint site, new contract ramps up, and an old contractor doesn’t get paid for work performed

DOD does logistics on a scale few other organizations touch with enormous capability and redundancy. Unfortunately there are also failures, including a seemingly growing problem with military housing and moves. Stars and Stripes recently reported the Pentagon has launched a website to track military housing issues, allowing service members and their families to submit feedback on their living conditions.

This follows years of inadequate oversight that led to serious problems such as pest infestations and mold. The feedback system aims to enhance the usual transparency and accountability, providing dissatisfied military families a single touchpoint to direct complaints. The site includes resources for submitting maintenance requests and initiating dispute resolution.

FedNewsNetwork reports that DOD is ready to start ramping up its new military-move contract. “The expansion of work under the up-to-$17.9 billion Global Household Goods contract (GHC), set for September, will mark DoD’s first attempt to use GHC beyond the short-distance, local moves it has been using to test the new program since April. ”

Why you file a claim even as you amicably work to get paid

Meanwhile, Platinum Services provided military moves to DOD via Army contract between 2010 and 2013. The company was unable to get paid for certain moves everyone agrees it conducted because DOD misplaced servicemembers’ orders authorizing the moves. Platinum worked with Army attempting to resolve this issues, including the following communications:

2012: More than 70 emails
2013: Over 60 emails
2014: 25 emails
2015: Approximately 134 emails
2016: Over 130 emails
2017: 54 emails
2018: More than 40 emails

Unfortunately, Platinum never submitted certified a claim as required by FAR § 33.207, and so the statute of limitations on nonpayment of the invoices expired. Platinum argued ASBCA should equitably toll the statute of limitation, but that requires willful misconduct to trick the other party into not filing certified claims, so Platinum will not be paid for these completed, accepted moves. Let this be a lesson to the trigger-shy:

It is well-established “[t]here is no . . . inconsistency between” the submission of a claim and “an expressed desire to continue to mutually work toward a claim’s resolution. [P]arties are not prevented or discouraged from settling their differences because the first written demand for payment as a matter of right that is not merely a routine request for payment is recognized and treated as a CDA ‘claim.’ If anything, such a rule promotes settlement by preventing procrastination.”

Whether this is a “win” for DOD is a more complicated question than ASBCA’s findings: the Pentagon let a new iteration of contracts for service-member moves that entangled contractors into Service Contract Act compliance, a slow-moving disaster everyone saw coming. Everyone now needs to row together to provide military families bare minimum service levels during their stressful, mission-mandated moves.