More than a year after pleading guilty to scamming an Army National Guard recruitment program out of more than $180,000, a former captain was sentenced to at least three years in prison in San Antonio, local
media
reported
Friday.
Fabian Barrera faces up to eight years behind bars,
MySanAntonio.com
reported, but he could cut that stay in half by paying back $130,000 of the ill-gotten funds, and he could knock off another year if he made “full restitution” — $212,000, including administrative fees — by Wednesday.
Barrera, 47, pleaded guilty in July 2013 to bribery, fraud, conspiracy and identity-theft charges stemming from his role in a scam that included more than two dozen people, KSAT-TV San Antonio reported.
The Guard Recruiting Assistance Program offered soldiers up to $3,000 for referring a potential recruit, according to a 2013 Justice Department news release on the case. For more than six years, beginning in late 2005, Barrera “paid Army National Guard recruiters … for the names and Social Security numbers of potential soldiers,” then claimed he had directed them into service and pocketed the bonus, the release states.
Barrera worked as a recruiting assistant in the program, DOJ officials said. He claimed to refer 119 people,
MySanAntonio.com
reported, pocketing $181,000 and generating unnecessary paperwork that racked up more than $30,000 in administrative fees.
The recruiting program began in 2005, when the Army National Guard faced a manpower shortage as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ramped up. Allegations of multiple acts similar to Barrera’s triggered “one of the largest fraud investigations that [the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division] had ever conducted,” according to a
report on the program
prepared by the National Guard Association of the United States.
The Guard ended the program in 2012. Estimates of the amount of fraudulent payments vary wildly, in part because of confusion between the program and similar pay-for-referral plans offered by the active force and elsewhere. The NGAUS paper noted less than $1 million worth of G-RAP fraud had been proven as of earlier this year, while government officials and media reports have put the possible amount of fraudulent payments at
up to $100 million
.
