AGUAS BUENAS, Puerto Rico — Task Force Raptor, a nationwide antifraud operation run by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command has grown into one of the largest criminal investigations ever conducted in the military, but critics say many people have been unfairly targeted and few have been found guilty.
The task force has looked into tens of thousands of current and former soldiers, from Maine to Guam. More than 150 have been charged; 540 more remain under investigation.
Five years after the task force was formed, National Guard members continue to be charged all over the country. In the coming weeks, several are headed to trial. The government says it’s hunting down scammers who took advantage of a defunct program called the Guard Recruiting Assistance Program, which at the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan paid soldiers a bounty for referring new recruits.
The Army says it paid out millions for referrals of recruits who enlisted of their own accord.
Soldiers targeted by the investigation say the task force, under pressure from Army leadership and the Congress, is determined to pursue charges when there are no crimes.
In Puerto Rico, scores of agents from the mainland stormed houses all over the island two years ago, arresting at gunpoint 25 current and former National Guard soldiers whom authorities accused of claiming hundreds of referral bonuses for recruits they had never met.
Soldiers there said in interviews that they had done nothing wrong and were mystified by the nighttime raids.
Others say the task force has relied on flimsy evidence that is often a decade old to arrest troops who have done nothing wrong, upending lives while delivering few convictions.
“Early on there were, in fact, cases of bad people doing bad things, and hopefully they got justice,’’ said Doug O’Connell, a National Guard colonel and former US prosecutor who, as a defense attorney, has represented more than a dozen soldiers accused of defrauding the incentive program. “But they kept going.’’
“Now we are down to the little guys, the average soldier, who if they did something wrong, they didn’t know it,’’ he said.
A Justice Department spokeswoman in San Juan refused to make prosecutors available for comment.
Initially, Task Force Raptor made headlines with a few big arrests, including of a fraud ring in Texas involving 13 soldiers who pleaded guilty to bilking the Army out of $244,000. But then the investigation foundered, uncovering far less fraud than originally estimated.
In 2014, Army leaders told Congress they had identified $29 million in fraud, and Raptor might find as much as $100 million. Years later, though, the Army has revised the number down to $6 million, according to an Army spokeswoman, recovering less than $3 million through the courts.
The program encouraged the Guard’s citizen-soldiers, who hold civilian jobs while performing part-time military service, to refer potential recruits they met at work, church, county fairs — anywhere their “sphere of influence’’ might extend. Soldiers whose referral resulted in a successful recruitment were paid between $2,000 and $7,500.
