Based on a decision of the Austrian Government the accounting/pay departments of all ministries were integrated into one Federal Accounting Agency on 1 January 2005. As of that moment the individual ministries have not had accounting/pay departments of their own any more. Subsequently, on 1 January 2006 a specific computer programme was introduced to do the accounting and transfer the payments of all federal civil servants. This application makes it possible to do the accounts and transfer the pay of employees with the same types of employment contracts, like the ones of tenured and contractual civil servants, within all federal ministries, however, not those of the Ministry of Defence, which is characterised by universal subscription and the possibility of voluntary national service, incurring manifold additional defence-based claims.
Therefore, a large part of payments to basic national service personnel and personnel doing service recalls of the Austrian Armed Forces needed to be continued to be carried out in cash. This required numerous and complicated administrational procedures: The required cash needed to be requested and fetched, sufficient change for exact payment had to be kept ready and accounted with the Federal Accounting Agency. The process of hiring new personnel involved comprehensive correspondence with social security underwriters, which had still to be done with the help of paper documents, in order to ensure the entitled service members would have a health insurance. The recipients of the payments had to queue in order to receive their payments and the person handing the money to the soldiers, for reasons of the peculiarities of military training, often needed to repeat the process several times, mostly even working in shifts, on weekends and on holidays, until all entitled personnel were given their money in time. Since some components of the payment, such as family support and/or living allowance or indemnification for lost earning incurred by the personnel during exercises, for which the Armed Forces Personnel Agency had been responsible already before, were done via money transfer, there were several paying authorities.
For soldiers participating in the large number of international operations of the Austrian Armed Forces effected within the framework of the United Nations, the European Union, NATO or the OSCE, yet invariably on the basis of a UN Security Council resolution, cashless payment could mostly be provided, however with serious restrictions: as the accounting system is a standard software, as described above, the particular conditions of serving in international operations could not be considered to a sufficient degree. Since the accounting system provides for only one payment date each month and requires a relatively long lead time, soldiers repeatedly had to wait until they were finally paid, while the period until then could be cushioned by way of a far-reaching advance payment system and extensive information right at the beginning of operations preparation.
The new solution was intended to implement up-to-date, cashless and automated payments for virtually all claims arising from defence-based employments. In addition, comprehensive electronic interfaces to our beneficiaries and external partners as well as to a modern, dual system of document delivery were to be introduced. This was to improve the contentment of clients and employees alike.
This was the starting situation in effect for all entitled basic and voluntary national service personnel and their families, external partners, such as the social security underwriters, but also the administrators of such payments and benefits within the Forces as well as political decision-makers and the top officials of the ministry.
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