The Pentagon announced Tuesday that after a review of bonuses improperly paid to as many as 17,500 California National Guard troops, only a few hundred will have to repay the money to the government.
Roughly $10 million bonuses for retention and recruitment were paid to Guard soldiers as a result of mistakes and criminal activities during the height of the Iraq War. When an audit uncovered the improper payments, the Pentagon began a process of “clawing back,” the money.
Some soldiers, who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay, had their wages garnished and tax liens slapped on them.
In deciding to forgive the vast majority of debts, the Pentagon acknowledged that most recipients of the bonuses had no idea they were not entitled to them.
“They’d gotten a bonus in exchange for a service commitment, then they fulfilled the service commitment, they served, they may even have been deployed, and then we came back and said, ‘By the way, you were ineligible, we’re taking your money back,'” said Peter Levine, acting undersecretary for personnel and readiness.
Of the roughly 17,500 cases the Pentagon reviewed, 1,400 involved troops who already repaid their bonuses in full. About half of them, 700 or so, will be eligible for refunds.
“The basic criteria we’ve been applying in looking at those is: Did this — if the servicemember fulfilled their service commitment and there’s no obvious reason to believe that they knew or should have known that there was an erroneous payment, then we don’t need further review and we’ll get rid of that case,” Levine said.
Another 16,000 have not paid any money back, and officials say approximately 15,000 will have their cases dropped without further attempts at collection.
That leaves about 1,000 cases of soldiers who will be told they must go before a Board for Correction of Military Records to argue their case.
“There will be some cases in which we have fraud or evidence of fraud or knowledge or should’ve known,” Levine said. “But most of the cases in which we’ll be recouping, we will be recouping because the soldier didn’t fulfill their commitment.”
Levine said a review of other states found no similar problem, which he said was caused by a lack of internal controls, and people with criminal intent.
“What we had in California was the vulnerability was systematically exploited, that’s why we had the problem there that we didn’t have elsewhere,” Levine said. “We had individuals who’ve been convicted of fraud and have been disciplined.”
The Pentagon expects to resolve all outstanding cases by July, a deadline set by Defense Secretary Ash Carter last year.
In the wake of the revelations that soldiers were being asked to repay the bonuses, Congress included language directing the Pentagon to conduct a case-by-case review, and settle them on terms beneficial to the soldiers.
“So we’re already conducting that review, we believe that our review is consistent with the requirements of that language,” Levine said.
