Army Reserve Soldiers have the unique responsibility of maintaining both civilian and Army careers. One Soldier who is deployed to the Middle East has gone above and beyond in both regards.
Capt. Jordan Goldie, deputy comptroller, 1st Theater Sustainment Command operational command post (TSC-OCP), has assisted in completely revamping the finance (G-8) section during his deployment, while also being selected for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Honor Award for his outstanding accomplishments in his civilian job.
Goldie and his team have improved operations in the G-8 section since their arrival to theater.
“Our team has been able to provide better oversight of the Government Purchase Card (GPC) and Global Combat Support System (GCSS) programs,” said Goldie. “This has allowed for enhanced and timelier transactions and procedures.”
They have also enhanced tracking of the data that they are responsible for.
“Since we took over, we have imposed more stringent tracking mechanisms,” said Goldie. “This has allowed for all of our transactions to be audit ready at any time.”
An even bigger accomplishment came from Goldie’s civilian efforts as a supervisory financial systems analyst for the USDA.
“There is a certification process that all USDA products have to go through before they go from our port to another country’s port - in this case it was various Chinese ports,” said Goldie. “The USDA tasked my team with developing an application that could function similarly to what was used in the past but with better internal controls.”
Goldie has his team were forced to respond expeditiously due to the, potentially, high-cost nature of the situation.
“When the previous system was taken offline, all of the shipments were halted at their respective ports,” said Goldie. “Not only were port fees accruing every day that the ships were at the port, but our products were at risk of spoiling.”
Though no small task, Goldie and his team accomplished praiseworthy work.
“My team was able to rapidly develop a new application, transfer all of the data from the old program to the new, and then transition all of that data from us to the Chinese,” said Goldie. “In doing so, we were able to prevent hundreds of millions of dollars of shipments from being dumped. We also reduced the port fees that the ships were accruing as they sat at port.”
Relations with Chinese partners were also at stake during this endeavor.
“Not only did we eliminate potential financial losses, we also maintained our relationship with our Chinese partners,” said Goldie. “In the last two years, we were able to facilitate the data transfer and communicate everything that was asked of us 100% of the time with zero errors.”
Due to the reduced agricultural impact and costs that were eliminated, Goldie and his team were recognized.
“My boss originally put my team in for the Food Safety Inspection Service award - basically, a lower level award - which we were selected to receive,” said Goldie. “From there, it worked its way up to the highest USDA honor that me and my two team leads received in Washington, D.C. from the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.”
Goldie shows humility and recognizes that he could not have done it without his teammates.
“I would not have been successful if it was not for my team,” said Goldie. “They say, ‘you’re only as good as those who work with you,’ and that proved true here.”
Goldie returns back to Iowa in the spring of 2020, where he will continue to be the epitome of what it means to be a citizen Soldier.