We owe the system—we owe the system—somehow in excess of $30,000 that they say they gave us and we have to pay them back. We had to remortgage the house. We had a lien put on us. Our backyard was left as a desert for the kids to play in—sorry, I'm starting to get pissed off talking about it. The contractor still continues to work with DND somehow. I don't know how. I thought he was a scumbag once we realized what he was doing. That's, again, my opinion.
I've been told on many occasions...usually it's our fault when paperwork goes missing or things aren't filled out. We were told we overspent on a budget. We didn't know we had a budget. We were told this is a project that will be dealt with as we go. A system was then put in place. The cap was the fair market value of the house. That cap was then retroactively imposed on our project, and that's how we ended up owing this money.
It's a bureaucracy. The computer doesn't care. All it knows is that its numbers don't match up, and it's now up to us to deal with it. As I said, this is just a little bit of what we have. We were told, “Go home and deal with it”, while raising two kids and also dealing with other issues.
When I was asked to come here, I thought, what can I say that hasn't been said already? That's just my story. I've talked to other guys and girls, other soldiers, that have had similar but not the same experiences. Bureaucracies, like a lot of things...we've heard this about a lot of government issues, but within DND itself we have a lot of this bureaucracy. The onus is on the injured soldier. Never mind dealing with losing legs or arms or broken backs, now worry about the paperwork—when we thought we had people dealing with it for us.
I'll end there. I want to hear the questions you have.