Revealed: The secret war over IDF officers' exorbitant salaries

Haaretz
The Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, has a monthly salary of NIS 68,060; a major general makes NIS 48,265 a month; and a brigadier general makes NIS 39,340 a month. The average monthly salary in Israel is close to NIS 8,000. While questions are occasionally raised as to the disparity between these sums, it appears that there are other potentially highly inflammatory data about military wages that the army is hiding.

This week, TheMarker revealed that MK Nahman Shai will receive the pension of a brigadier general for his whole life, after only having held the rank for less than three years (as head of the IDF Spokespersons' Unit), despite the fact that to receive such a salary, an officer needs to have served at the rank for more than three years. In order to enable the Kadima lawmaker to receive the lavish pension, valued at an estimated NIS 3 million, the Israel Defense Forces arranged for Shai to take an unpaid vacation for almost five years - which enabled him to buy a huge pension at the expense of the public purse, at a dirt cheap price.

Whoever questions how the IDF cooks up these shady deals regarding senior officers' leaving conditions, and how the deals are not exposed and criticized, will receive an answer immediately. The simple answer is that everything connected to the terms of military pensions remains unknown, beyond any kind of external supervision...

...The fact that the army's system for wage payments is beyond the supervision of the Defense Ministry's accountant sparks considerable dismay. In complete contrast to this, the accountant can check every other payment made in the Defense Ministry - payments that are made through the Enterprise Resource Planning system, to which the accountant has access. [US taxpayers give Israel $7 million per day; this expenditure also entails no oversight] Full story