A retired Army colonel from Westlake who spent more than three decades in uniform was told last year that he owed the government $17,694 — and he paid it. Now, after nearly a year and a half of silence, Zoltan Krompecher is among more than 200 veterans nationwide set to get that money back after the Army finally signed off on a debt waiver.
Krompecher received a letter in May 2025 informing him that he had been overpaid $17,694 in retirement benefits, according to Cleveland 19 News. The culprit, per the station's report, was an Army computer system that pulled incorrect service-start dates for some soldiers, throwing off how their retirement pay was calculated. Those bad dates directly affected the benefit amounts the system spit out, leaving veterans like Krompecher on the hook for money the Army said it had mistakenly paid them.
Rather than fight it, Krompecher sent the Defense Finance and Accounting Service a check covering the full amount after receiving the repayment notice, the station reported. What followed was a long stretch of nothing. “I still haven't received a phone call, not an email. Nothing,” Krompecher said, describing a wait of nearly a year and a half with no word from DFAS.
A Request From the Top That Took 14 Months
The fix had actually been set in motion well before Krompecher's long wait ended. Then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote to DFAS in July 2025 urging the agency to waive the debts, telling officials that 235 retirees had been affected through no fault of their own, per the same account. But DFAS told the station it did not receive a signed waiver from the Army until Sept. 10, 2026 — a full 14 months after Driscoll's request went out.
Krompecher didn't navigate the bureaucracy alone. John Riess, with the Cuyahoga County Veterans Service Commission, helped him work the issue, and Riess said an Army general had recognized the error and indicated that repaying the affected veterans was in the Army's own best interest. Even with that acknowledgment inside the Army, the paperwork took well over a year to clear.
DFAS Says Refunds Are Coming, Few Answers on the Cause
With the waiver finally signed, DFAS told the station the Department of War waived debts for more than 200 affected veterans, and the agency expects to complete that waiver processing by Oct. 23. Veterans who already paid toward the waived debts, like Krompecher, will have that money refunded or applied to other existing debts, if applicable.
What DFAS has not done is explain what it called a system issue in any detail. The agency declined to elaborate on the underlying technical problem and referred those questions to the Army. The Army, for its part, had not responded to the station's request for comment as of publication.
DFAS maintains a public page on debt waivers and remissions for service members who are told they owe money, directing them toward the process for disputing or seeking relief from such debts. A 2019 report from the Government Accountability Office had previously flagged broader concerns that some service members may not be properly notified of debts, their rights to dispute them, or the consequences of inaction — a gap the report said could persist without changes to how the military services and DFAS handle debt-collection policy.
For now, Krompecher and the other veterans swept up in the Army's data error are left waiting for the refunds DFAS has promised by the end of this month, more than a year after Driscoll first pressed the agency to make it right.
