I was in Iraq when JPA went live and the majority of deployed personnel I spoke to in Basra didn’t get paid at all. I spent most of my time worrying about my pay. I then spent a fortune on phone cards, trying to reassure my distraught wife that she could go food shopping for her and my children and we would sort the overdraft out later. We had no support in theatre and my family had no support in the UK.
RAF Officer

JPA has been an absolute disaster. I am at the point of self-destruction. Try logging on at peak times or saving a record given the miniscule bandwidth. Training has also been massively underestimated – HR professionals and self-service users alike are guessing at processes.
Careers manager

Thousands of people are underpaid or not paid at all. I have been billed more than £3,000 for no reason. Although JPAC admits I owe nothing, it states that no function exists for repaying me. I am very close to defaulting on my mortgage. Our hierarchy need to realise that they are playing with our lives. Morale is at an all-time low.
RAF Officer

My pay has been wrong since JPA implementation in the Army. Every month I am told to wait until the pay run to see if it is sorted. When it isn’t, I’m told it could take up to 10 days to resolve, by which point I’ve missed the pay deadline and am underpaid again. It is not a small amount either – we are talking about 50 per cent of my monthly wage.
Soldier, Scotland

The senior military officers appear blissfully unaware of the problems. People are leaving the services at a time when we can ill afford it.
Territorial Army (TA) HR administrator

I deployed to Iraq and there was no JPA terminal to complete the receipts process, so my advance was recovered direct through my pay. I spoke to the JPAC call centre using my 20-minute phonecard – which should have been used to talk to my partner – and was told that nothing could be done because I needed to speak to my unit HR, who were not in theatre. I was significantly out of pocket for the year it has taken to sort it all out since repatriation.
Anon

This morning I spent two hours trying to claim allowances for two days away in a hotel.
Flight Lieutenant, MOD HQ

After problems with JPA, when I was remortgaging I had difficulty proving my salary, as my previous four months’ pay statements were a joke. The whole experience was very stressful and I have no faith that the system will work for me in the future.
Anon

In Al Udeid in the Middle East, 16-hour days and one JPA terminal between 400 permanent staff and numerous transit personnel made time a premium. I input my Children’s Educational Allowance (CEA) at the end of July. Returned end of August – no CEA in bank. Told no entry has been received – please send a manual claim. But now cannot input a claim as the “window” has closed. Lucky the school bursar is understanding.
Anon

Whole TA battalions “disappeared” off the pay roll!
TA

Underpaid by £2,500, and five months of my time to get it back; a pay statement that hasn’t made sense since JPA’s introduction; and a
service team that closes outstanding queries whether the problem is solved or not.
Underpaid and frustrated

As an HR administrator, we were left floundering – not able to help personnel coming into the office, not trained properly and left totally frustrated. The problems are ongoing, pay is screwed up and problems take forever to resolve.
Sam

I am an RAF senior officer in Afghanistan. Until arriving in Kabul I was spending at least an hour per day trying to track down the £7,000+ owed. As I have no access to JPA here I would have to get a close protection team to take me to check my pay chit. If they are screwing me around as an experienced Group Captain, what are they doing to the younger, less financially stable lads and lasses?
Anon

JPA is a malfunctioning, user-unfriendly nightmare and has contributed more to a serious drop in morale than anything in the past 20 years.
SPD

What Ministry of Defence management has to say