Fraud and Abuse in Army Recruiting Contracts

The Recruiting Assistance Program (RAP) was born in 2005 when the Army National Guard (ARNG) was struggling to meet its recruitment numbers due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The National Guard's Recruiting Assistance Program (G?RAP), would provide incentives to National Guard soldiers and civilians to act as informal recruiters, or recruiting assistants (RA). These recruiting assistants would receive a payment between $2,000 and $7,500 for every new recruit. The contract was run out of the Army National Guard's Strength Maintenance Division (ASM), and administered by a contractor, Docupak. The recruiting assistants were hired by Docupak as subcontractors. After the program was put in place, the National Guard began to meet its recruiting goals and the Active Army and Army Reserve began their own similar programs. In 2007, however, Docupak discovered instances of potential fraud, which it referred to the Army. Four years later, after suspecting a pattern of fraud, the Army requested a program-wide audit, and what the audit found was astounding?thousands of National Guard and Army Reserve participants who are associated with payments that are at high or medium risk for fraud, with an estimated total amount of $29 million paid fraudulently.