30, and more soldiers were leaving each month than the number enlisting. The Army Guard missed its recruiting goal for the fiscal year that ended Sept. Guard leaders have talked about providing incentive pay to recruiters and Guard troops who bring in new recruits. And they want to ensure that any new program doesn’t have similar fraud and abuse problems. The new investigation comes as National Guard Bureau leaders are pushing to launch another recruiting bonus program, in an attempt to boost lagging enlistment numbers. “We acknowledge those mistakes and are taking action to correct these records.” He said he ordered the full review after CID received requests from some individuals to review the files. “Simply put, proper procedures were not always followed,” CID Director Greg Ford said in a statement provided to the AP.

Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not yet made public, said CID has found that individuals may have been wrongly listed in the FBI database in more than half of the cases that have been reviewed so far. Officials said that at the time, CID agents were grappling with a massive probe involving 100,000 people and hundreds of thousands of dollars in potentially fraudulent bonus payments. They said agents during the initial investigation may have misunderstood facts or failed to follow proper procedures and erroneously added soldiers’ names to an FBI crime database and Pentagon records. Army investigators are reviewing the cases and correcting records because some individuals were wrongly blamed and punished, The Associated Press has learned.Īccording to officials with knowledge of the review, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division will review all 1,900 cases by the end of this year to identify and begin to fix the mistakes. WASHINGTON - Years after about 1,900 National Guard and Reserve soldiers were swept up in a recruiting bonus scandal, U.S.

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