A Huge Load Of G-RAP

“The real tragic outcome from this G-RAP debacle is the soldiers and former soldiers who stood up and volunteered to serve and protect our Constitution are now being treated as criminals without any kind of due process rights, and it’s horrific what Army CID has done.” – Army Special Forces COL (ret) Douglas K. O’Connell, Attorney at law.

It sounded like a good idea; pay Guardsmen and Reservists to help recruit people into the Army. The plan was if you, as a soldier, could talk someone into joining, the Army would pay you $1000 when they signed on and another $1000 once your recruit finished basic training. Pretty sweet. I would have been all over that if it had been available when I was in the Army. But, looking back on the vast cluster it has become, I’m really glad I wasn’t there for the “opportunity.” Soldiers who participated in the program were known as recruiter’s assistants.

The Recruiting Program

In 2005, when we were busy fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army desperately needed more soldiers. So that’s when they created the Army Reserve Recruiting Assistance Program (AR-RAP) and the National Guard Recruiting Assistance Program (G-RAP). I explained above, in the broadest terms, how the program worked. It was ingenious; overnight, the military had thousands of new part-time recruiters motivated by a financial incentive. So what could possibly go wrong?

Up front, we should realize that the US government outsourced management of the recruiting programs to a federal contractor, Docupak, a private company.

The program was the most successful recruiting program ever conducted by the military. The reservist’s contacts led to about 150,000 recruits. This cost the service $459.4 million. After almost seven years, the Army ended the program following widespread allegations of fraud. That’s not too surprising when nearly half a billion dollars are in play. Somebody somewhere is bound to get greedy. According to Col O’Connell in an interview with Fox News, “There were some recruiters who were manipulating data and giving kickbacks, or sharing money with recruiting assistants.” He referred to it as “very limited when you considered the size and the scope of the program.”  

O’Connell goes on to say how, in his opinion, Army leadership, in their testimony to Congress, gave “grossly inaccurate numbers of people who had participated in the program who they labeled criminals.” The Army planned to investigate all 106,000 soldiers paid through the program. While addressing Congress, the Army told lawmakers they could uncover up to $100,000,000 of fraudulent activity; almost one in every four dollars spent on the program. By 2017 the Army took a look at its accounting a second time and lowered that number by 94%, down to $6,000,000. Still, nothing to sneeze at, but nowhere near 100 miles. As of this writing, a total of $478,002 has been repaid to the US Treasury, and soldiers paid over $60,000 in fines until, in 2016, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter stopped the Pentagon’s efforts to try to recoup money from service members following pushback from Congress. Lawmakers made the case that some of the soldiers who were overpaid were unaware of that fact.

The Army Criminal Investigation Division checked out the cases of suspected fraud. But, by all accounts, they did a sloppy job. Col O’Connell explains how CID would call people on the phone, sometimes several years after they had gotten out of the service, and ask them, “Who was the first person you talked to about joining the National Guard?” If they didn’t say the recruiting assistant’s name, the investigators assumed the recruiting assistant was guilty of criminal misconduct, a charge that O’Connell called “absolutely ridiculous.” 

Of course, with all that money and the bureaucracy involved, there were a few bad actors. In the end, 286 soldiers received nonjudicial punishments for their roles in the scam, according to the current CID Director. One hundred and thirty-seven troops were prosecuted in civilian courts for fraudulently receiving compensation via the program. Unfortunately, the man you are about to read about was not among them.

The Story of Captain Benjamin Steinmann

While still a cadet at the University of South Carolina, Ben Sternemann participated in the G-RAP program. It was an excellent way for a college student to make a few extra bucks. He explained to Fox News how simple the program was. “You would engage people who were not in the military and talk to them about the Guard, you would input their information into a database online, and if they ended up joining, you got paid.” He put three people through the program and earned a total of $6,000.

As one of the soldiers who took money from the program, he never knew he was under investigation. He had done nothing wrong. But, he states, “Most District Attornies would not touch these cases because they were so tainted with cookie-cutter interrogations, phone interviews, and poor documentation.” Translation: Civilian authorities were of little or no help to those affected by the allegations of criminal wrongdoing brought on my G-RAP.

How The Damage Was Done

During their work, the CID would “title” those who were being investigated. Simply put, this means they are getting your name in the title block of a criminal report that shows the laws you are alleged to have violated. Remember that these are simply investigations, not necessarily probable cause investigations. At this point, all the soldiers involved were guilty of trying to help the Army get new recruits because they were being offered a finders fee to do so. It didn’t matter if the soldiers had been officially charged with or convicted of a crime; they had all been titled. What’s that old saying, “No good deed goes unpunished”? It gets worse, much worse.

After CID titled the recruiting assistants as subjects of a serious criminal investigation, they gave that information to the FBI’s Criminal History Data Center, a federal criminal database. Now, all of these soldiers who were titled have a criminal history. The way the information was entered shows up on a background check as an arrest. These soldiers were never arrested or taken into custody; they only got phone calls inquiring about their participation in the program. According to O’Connell, they now have a criminal history that is “wrong and illegal.” 

Back to Ben Sternemann’s case. He helped recruit some new soldiers into the Army as a cadet. Years later, he received a call from CID asking him about the process. He thought that was unusual, but it was just a phone call. He was not placed under arrest or given any indication there was a criminal case pending against him. Sternemann says,

“One of the worst parts of this is that I had no idea, I had no idea that this had occurred, and I found out about it years later when applying for a concealed weapons permit, that I had what looks to be a pending charge.”  

As you might imagine, being titled by Army CID can seriously affect your life. If you are still on active duty, forget about being promoted. This can be career-ending. For officers, it’s “up or out.” Once a soldier is out of the service, the repercussions can be just as dire. Col O’Connell talks about how he has clients who have been denied professional licenses (medical personnel, real estate agents, etc.) because, on their background checks, it looks like they have been arrested for a serious crime, and the matter has not been resolved.

Ben Stenemann was working for a police department in South Carolina when he was titled. He admits that his employer worked with him as much as they could when they found out about his situation. They looked at all the paperwork available to them, but they had to let him go when it came down to it. Unfortunately, they could not do anything because all of their law enforcement officers had to be credentialed, and Stenemann could not be with what his NCIC report showed.

His wife and family were supportive, but you can imagine the enormous amount of stress placed on the man. He had a young family to support, and how he had lost his job through no fault of his own. He became depressed for a while but eventually pulled out of it, realizing he had to continue despite the injustice done to him.

Army CID stated in July that they would review about 800 of the titles they initiated because of G-RAP. They say they are maintaining an ongoing review of all of their investigations. As part of his law practice, Col O’Connell has worked with those impacted by the CID investigations of G-RAP for over a decade. He tells Fox News that he sees nothing that leads him to believe “they are going to overturn their long-held decisions.” He advocates for an independent third-party review of the cases. Stenemann does not put a lot of faith in CID reviewing its own cases; he says, “It feels a lot like a fox in the hen house.” 

He verbalizes the irony of the situation as he says, “Those of us in the military are not being afforded the rights that we were fighting for.” 

SOFREP thanks and acknowledges the hard work done by Fox News in compiling the information included in this report. Without their hard work and dedication, this story might not have ever reached the large audience it deserves. Please watch the video above for more information on the ongoing G-RAP debacle.

Action on the Errors

In September 2021, Gregory Ford became CIDs first ever civilian director. He told Stars and Stripes that “More than half of the 900-some cases reviewed to date by Army Criminal Investigations Division agents required some form of records correction after the soldiers were included in a 2012 to 2016 investigation of fraudulent payments made to troops participating in the recruiting program.” He said corrective actions were taken. These included numerous “records corrections” including removing hundreds of names from the NCIC database.

Even though he was not in charge when it happened, Ford states, “It is clear we fell short in a large number of the investigations, and we are dedicated to completing a review of our processes, policies, and training to ensure that such errors do not ever occur again.” Ford told reporters that the vast majority of investigations (as many as 1,900) would be finished by the end of 2022.

He encourages anyone who believes their information was wrongly reported to the FBI or other criminal investigative agencies due to the G-RAP investigation to contact CID via its criminal records center website at www.cid.army.mil/crc.html.