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Back in 2005 with wars popping up all over, the Army launched a recruiting incentive plan to pay bonuses to people who recommended folks who enlisted. No potential for problems there, eh? Johnny wants to enlist, says his buddy Ronny sent him to the recruiter, Ronny splits the $2000 with Johnny and everyone is happy.<\/p>\n
The soldiers\u2019 saga started in 2005, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military<\/a> needed more bodies, so it started the National Guard Recruiting Assistance Program (G-RAP) and its smaller Army Reserve counterpart (AR-RAP).<\/p>\n
The programs created thousands of temporary recruiters overnight, offering $2,000 for each person they steered toward the Guard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Over all, the program cost almost $460 million to bring in 150,000 recruits. It was contracted out to a company called Docupak, via a process which met almost no government acquisitions standards, contracted by a National Guard officer, Kay Hensen, who went to work for Docupak. Smells, right?<\/p>\n
An Army audit found “thousands \u2026 of participants who were associated with payments that are at high or medium risk for fraud,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, said during a\u00a0scathing 2014 hearing<\/a> demanding answers from the Army. As if all that was not bad enough, the Army has determined in its investigation that the entire program was illegal from the beginning,” McCaskill said in the hearing, noting that the payments exceeded limits Congress had placed<\/a> on bonuses the Army could pay. “All of the money spent on the program \u2026 was illegal.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So the Army launched Task Force Raptor to ferret out the fraud.<\/p>\n
The Army vowed to investigate all\u00a0106,364\u00a0people paid by the recruiting program and launched Task Force Raptor, believed to be its biggest investigation in history.<\/p>\n
Critics of the probes argue that the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) agents made sloppy cases against the recruiting assistants, accusing them of stealing personal information from recruits they had never met and collecting payment as if they had referred them to the Guard.<\/p>\n
“If they didn\u2019t say the recruiting assistant\u2019s name, the investigators assumed the recruiting assistant was guilty of criminal misconduct which is absolutely ridiculous,” said O\u2019Connell, who has represented around 225 G-RAP participants in both civil and criminal cases.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Army said in 2014 they would show $100,000,000 in fraud.\u00a0 By 2017 they revised that to $6 million, and by now they are up to (drum roll please!) just over a half-million in recovered funds and fines.\u00a0\u00a0 They have spent $28,000,000 to accomplish this.<\/p>\n
Then\u00a0 CID “titled” the folks they investigated – inserting notice in their permanent records that the soldiers were investigated:<\/p>\n
Titling is a process within CID that creates a permanent record showing a soldier was the subject of an investigation regardless of whether they are ever charged with a crime.<\/p>\n
Then the Army forwarded that information to the FBI\u2019s criminal database<\/a> where the titles show up as an arrest, O\u2019Connell said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In the example cases provided, one captain’s promotion packet was derailed by titling. In another, a vet working as a police officer had his CCW denied – and then lost his job, because the Army shows an arrest.\u00a0 In all, over 2500 files were ‘titled’ , 1500+ cases were referred to civilian prosecutors who prosecuted 137 and declined to pursue the rest.<\/p>\n
So CID has spent all most 30 mill to recover barely more than a half a million, wasted 6 years doing so, and tarred hundreds of folks’ records with entries which make them look like felons – and won’t correct the records.<\/p>\n
Fifty-three soldiers and veterans affiliated with G-RAP asked CID to remove the title from their record as of 2021. The Army denied every single request, according to data an adviser for a U.S. senator shared with Fox News on the condition of anonymity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n