Former Sergeant Becomes Millionaire By Gaming Recruiting Incentive Program
It is amazing how these people became millionaires by gaming a stupid program that should have never been put in place to begin with:
WASHINGTON — The Army paid a Texas couple nearly $4 million for supplying it with names of recruits who may have enlisted without their help, part of a bonus program blasted by a leading senator as a “mind-blowing” waste of taxpayer money, according to interviews and documents.
The Army’s Referral Bonus Program — hatched in 2006 during the darkest days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and buried in 2009 — paid as much as $2,000 per recruit. It mirrored a National Guard program so plagued with kickbacks that more than 800 soldiers have fallen under criminal investigations in the last few years, according to Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the financial and contracting oversight subcommittee.
Military investigators branded the scheme “sleazy but legal,” McCaskill wrote in a letter to top Pentagon officials.
Rene Agosto, a former Army sergeant currently working as a civilian in Texas for the Air Force, developed a website called OfficialArmy.com to collect names of potential recruits. The site, designed to look like the government-run Army online portal, attracted potential recruits and encouraged them to fill out a form with personal information. Agosto and his wife Vanessa submitted those names — as many as 12 at a time — to Army recruiters and collected $3,845,000, according to the Army and McCaskill. (Army Times)
You can read more at the link, but even though Senator McCaskill is completely right about this, there is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black in regards to a member of Congress complaining about wasteful spending like this.
So the deal here was that he ran a site that people gave info to thinking it was the official site and when later they actually joined up they unknowingly were being sponsored by the guy and the Army never bothered to check to see if they actually knew their sponsor?
Not sure why anyone’s mad about this as it sounds like your standard totally f**king stupid government/military idea. The thing is when you complain about 5hit like this or try to get it fixed you are presented with an a55ton of people who want to give you 5hit for bucking the system or “making waves” and even if you ignore these people you’ll still have to deal with about a billion organizational roadblocks.
Proof that Republicans do not practice what they preach. They create wasteful spending programs despite campaigning against it.
As long as no laws were broken & it was no less unethical than what the government does, then more power to him. What really rankles the military & government is that they didn’t think of it first or they cannot think of a way to get in on the profits…
I wish I had thought of it…