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Shed light on pay data

Having led the fight to close the gap between average military and private-sector pay — once as high as 13.5 percent and now under 3 percent — advocacy groups are setting their sights on a more complicated issue.

The Military Coalition, an umbrella group of more than 30 military associations, is focusing on the Pentagon’s method for comparing military and civilian compensation.

The Pentagon’s aim is to keep basic pay and allowances at the 70th percentile of civilian earnings. This means troops should be better compensated than 70 percent of their civilian peers of similar age, education and experience.

Defense officials maintain this goal was reached years ago, and dispute the existence of any “pay gap.” Indeed, some officials argue that when benefits such as health care, retirement and tax breaks are added in, almost all troops rise to the 80th percentile of civilian compensation — and some, in particular the most junior, reach the 90th percentile.

The Military Coalition doesn’t buy it, arguing that the Pentagon has never fully explained just how it comes up with its civilian compensation yardstick. That makes it difficult to gauge the fairness and accuracy of the whole exercise. It’s simply too easy to manipulate the statistics.

The fact is, too much about military compensation is wrapped in secrecy. For example, along with keeping pay comparability data under wraps, the Pentagon refuses to divulge which ZIP codes are excluded from its housing allowance surveys — potentially raising or lowering those allowances substantially, depending on which ZIP codes are included and which are not.

This is not the stuff of national security. The Pentagon should lay out its methodology in detail. Then, if it fails to prove its case, Congress can do something about it.