Army probes whether troops wrongly targeted in bonus scandal
WASHINGTON — Years after about 1,900 National Guard and Reserve soldiers were swept up in a recruiting bonus scandal, U.S. Army investigators are reviewing the cases and correcting records because some individuals were wrongly blamed and punished, Army officials said Thursday.
The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division said it will complete a review of the bulk of the 1,900 soldiers by the end of this year to identify and fix the mistakes. CID said agents during the initial investigation may have misunderstood facts or failed to follow proper procedures, erroneously adding soldiers’ names to an FBI crime database and Pentagon records. Officials said that at the time, CID agents were grappling with a probe involving 100,000 people and hundreds of thousands of dollars in potentially fraudulent bonus payments.
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“Simply put, proper procedures were not always followed,” CID Director Greg Ford said in a statement.
Ford said Thursday that so far CID has reviewed cases of about 900 individuals, and a majority require some type of corrective action. He said that up to 200 of those have been completed and corrected, and individuals will be notified. He said “a number” of individuals contacted CID early this year saying they believed they were wrongly listed on the FBI database, and as agents began to review the files they found problems with the cases. As a result, he said he ordered a review of all cases.
“CID is fully committed to identifying and correcting all records,” Ford told reporters on Thursday. “CID takes our responsibilities in this area very seriously. And it is clear that we fell short in a large number of these investigations. “
The new investigation comes as National Guard Bureau leaders are pushing to launch another recruiting bonus program to boost lagging enlistment numbers. And they want to ensure that any new program doesn’t have similar fraud problems. Guard leaders have talked about providing incentive pay to recruiters and Guard troops who bring in new recruits. The Army Guard missed its recruiting goal for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, and more soldiers were leaving each month than the number enlisting.
“We could really help make every single guardsman a recruiter by paying them a bonus for anybody they bring into the organization,” Gen. Dan Hokanson, chief of the National Guard Bureau, told reporters in September. He said procedures needed to be fixed so that fraud didn’t happen again.
