Hundreds of US soldiers are under criminal investigation in what military officials described on Tuesday as a widespread scheme to take fraudulent payments and kickbacks from an army recruiting programme, costing the US tens of millions of dollars.

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Two army generals told a Senate panel on Tuesday of the widespread scheme to defraud a National Guard recruiting programme, which was put in place in 2005 to boost flagging enlistment during a crucial period of the Iraq War. The fraud cost the US at least $29m, and possibly tens of millions dollars more, they said.

As many as 200 officers, including two generals, are suspected of abusing the programme, which paid out cash bonuses ranging from $2,000 to $7,500 per recruit.

The programme was successful in helping the Guard reach its recruitment levels and was eventually adopted as well by the Army Reserve and the active duty army.

In total, army criminal investigators are examining more than 1,200 people, a mix of civilians with military ties and men and women in uniform. At least 60 investigators are working full time on the case.

Officials said on Tuesday they may not complete their investigation until as late as 2016 because of the number of potential cases.

Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill called the investigation ‘‘one of the largest that the army has ever conducted, both in terms of the sheer volume of fraud and the number of participants’’.

‘‘These are criminals that have dishonoured the uniform we are all so proud of,’’ she said at the hearing by the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on financial and contracting oversight, which she leads.

Lieutenant General William T. Grisoli, director of Army Staff, said there was a ‘‘fundamental breakdown’’ in establishing and executing the programme.

Coerced into splitting bonuses

Uniformed recruiters were supposedly prohibited from receiving the cash payments. But investigators have since found they worked around that prohibition by any number of means, and for several years did so virtually undetected.

Some recruiting assistants eligible for the payments were coerced into splitting their bonuses with military recruiters. Other military recruiters didn’t inform civilian assistants about the bonuses but registered them for the programme. The military recruiters would then substitute their own bank information for that of the civilian assistants.

In one of the largest cases, five people split roughly $1 million, said Major General David E. Quantock, head of the army’s Criminal Investigation and Corrections commands.

Quantock said investigators had clearly identified $29 million in fraudulent bonus payments and were investigating another $66 million in potential cases.

One person, now under prosecution, was fraudulently paid $275,000 under the recruitment programme, and four other top recipients received more than $100,000 apiece, documents from a panel of the Senate Homeland Security committee said.

Auditors shut down the programme in 2012 after watchdogs found evidence of widespread abuse.

In all, the Army National Guard paid upward of $300 million for roughly 130,000 enlistments.

(FRANCE 24 with AP, REUTERS)

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