A decade after the Army ended a recruiting program embroiled in accusations of fraud and mismanagement, more than 2,400 soldiers who were never charged with wrongdoing are likely shackled by a misleading flag on their criminal records.
“We are branded as criminals,” Army Capt. Gilberto De Leon told Fox News. “There was times where I broke down on my knees … My career ruined, about to lose my pension. How am I gonna support my family of eight?”
Soldiers and veterans say they’ve lost jobs, been denied bank loans or weapons permits, and suffered other consequences because of an obscure Army process that treats anyone who is merely investigated for wrongdoing as guilty.
“I did nothing wrong,” said South Carolina Army National Guard Capt. Benjamin Sternemann, who was several years into a career as a police officer when the flag popped up on his background check. “I was never arrested and never charged. And I lost my job anyway.”
‘Illegal from the beginning’
The soldiers’ saga started in 2005, at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. military needed more bodies, so it started the National Guard Recruiting Assistance Program (G-RAP) and its smaller Army Reserve counterpart (AR-RAP).
The programs created thousands of temporary recruiters overnight, offering $2,000 for each person they steered toward the Guard.
“All they had to do was talk to somebody for a few minutes and submit their name so that an actual recruiter could get them in the door,” Sternemann said. If they shipped to basic training, the recruiting assistants got paid.
Sternemann said he referred three people and was paid $6,000 while attending the University of South Carolina around 2010. De Leon participated between 2007 and 2009, collecting $11,000 for six recruits.
“The programs, by all accounts, worked fantastic,” lawyer and retired Green Beret Doug O’Connell said.
The Army enlisted more than 150,000 new recruits and reported spending around $459.4 million on the programs.
But G-RAP came under scrutiny in 2012, and the Army ended the program. Federal investigators found the Army had contracted with a company called Docupak to run the programs in a process that met “almost none” of the federal acquisition requirements, USA Today reported. The National Guard Bureau officer who awarded the contract later went to work for Docupak.
An Army audit found “thousands … 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 scathing 2014 hearing 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 on bonuses the Army could pay. “All of the money spent on the program … was illegal.”
The Army vowed to investigate all 106,364 people paid by the recruiting program and launched Task Force Raptor, believed to be its biggest investigation in history.
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. Former recruiting assistants and their lawyers say CID cold-called troops as much as a decade after the fact and asked if they remembered who referred them to the guard.
Army leadership told Congress in 2014 that Task Force Raptor might uncover as much as $100 million in fraud. Three years later, the Army revised that estimate to $6 million, after spending around $28 million on the investigation.
As of 2022, Task Force Raptor resulted in just $478,002 repaid to the U.S. Treasury and $58,403 in fines and fees, according to Army data.
The Army referred 1,503 cases to civilian authorities. Prosecutors pursued charges in 137 of those cases.
“Most district attorneys would not touch these cases because they were so tainted with cookie cutter interrogations, phone interviews and poor documentation,” Sternemann said.
But thousands of soldiers who were never charged with a crime — and in many cases had no idea they’d been under investigation — became unexpected casualties of Task Force Raptor.
‘Branded as criminals’
Sternemann was several years into a career as a police officer when he applied for a concealed weapon permit in 2018. He received a denial notice by mail and contacted licensing officials to ask why.
When he received a copy of his background check, he stared in shock at the single entry: “ARREST DATE 2016-03-02.”
Three charges followed: aggravated identity theft, wire fraud and fraud.
“I was never arrested, never charged,” he told Fox News. “I had no idea that this had occurred. Read Full Story Here
