WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 begin to fix the mistakes. CID 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.
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.
“Simply put, proper procedures were not always followed,” CID Director Greg Ford said in a statement provided to the AP.
Ford said Thursday that so far CID has reviewed cases of about 900 individuals, and a majority of them 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.