FBI Called in As 'ghost' Scouts Boost Numbers - and Funds

Whoever thought up an apparent scam to raise money for the Alabama Boy Scouts by inflating membership numbers will not be getting badges for originality. Many of their invented "ghost" scouts had the same name.

The FBI has been called in to investigate after the discovery of lots of scouts called Doe on the Alabama membership rolls who do not seem to exist.

If the idea was to escape detection, it was a particularly poor choice of name. People whose identities are being sought by the police are generally labelled John or Jane Doe.

There are also claims that whole "ghost" scout troops have appeared in official documentation. High membership numbers do not just make the scouts look good, they can bring in millions of dollars. The donations the regional and local scout councils raise depend largely on those figures.

One of the biggest donors in Alabama, the United Way charity, said it had taken the scouts' membership numbers on trust and had not attempted to verify them.

The discrepancies came to light when a scoutmaster who also happened to be a white-collar crime detective in Birmingham received a confirmation letter for financial support he had neither sought nor received.

The scoutmaster-detective, Wayne Lee, sounded the alarm.

He told the Birmingham News: "This is going to be bad for scouting on the public front, but good for scouting in the long run - it's got to be fixed."

The Greater Alabama Boy Scout Council issued a statement on its website conceding that it was facing "difficult challenges", and that it was cooperating with the FBI investigation.

"Let me assure you that your executive committee considers these allegations to be very serious and is taking necessary and appropriate action," the new chairman of the council, Randy Haines, said.

However, the "ghost scout" problem may go beyond Alabama.

An audit was launched last month in Atlanta, Georgia, after accusations from a civil rights leader, Joseph Beasley, that the scout council had rigged its black recruiting figures, claiming 20,000 African American scouts across the city, when the actual number was 500.

"Over the last 10 years it appears that the Boy Scouts of America have committed a gross fraud in Atlanta by falsifying the registration of thousands of Black boys to raise money," Mr Beasley told the Atlanta Daily World. "Apparently, they have also falsified the registration of thousands of adult leaders and an entire network of phantom Boy Scout troops and Cub Scout packs."

A scout group in Texas removed thousands of names from its rolls after it came under scrutiny two years ago.

Greg Shields, a spokesman at the scouts' national headquarters in Irving, Texas, told reporters that the organisation was "dedicated to the accurate reporting of membership".