How Fraud Swamped Minnesota's Social Services System on Tim Walz's Watch - NYT [View all]

Hard to read, but we are going to hear about it for the next year.

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The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

At first, many in the state saw the case as a one-off abuse during a health emergency. But as new schemes targeting the state’s generous safety net programs came to light, state and federal officials began to grapple with a jarring reality. Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.

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The episode has raised broader questions for some residents about the sustainability of Minnesota’s Scandinavian-modeled system of robust safety net programs bankrolled by high taxes. That system helped create an environment that drew immigrants to the state over many decades, including tens of thousands of Somali refugees after their country descended into civil war in the 1990s.

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The program’s annual cost ballooned to more than $104 million last year, the authorities said, from a budgeted projection of $2.6 million when it began in 2020. Two of eight people charged in the scenario have pleaded guilty; six others have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial. In another program, aimed to provide therapy for autistic children, prosecutors said providers recruited children in Minneapolis’s Somali community, falsely certifying them as qualifying for autism treatment and paying their parents kickbacks for their cooperation.

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In 2020, Minnesota Department of Education officials who administered the program became overwhelmed by the number of applicants seeking to register new feeding sites and began raising questions about the plausibility of some invoices. Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit group that was the largest provider in the pandemic program, responded with a warning. In an email, the group told the state agency that failing to promptly approve new applicants from “minority-owned businesses” would result in a lawsuit featuring accusations of racism that would be “sprawled across the news.”

Feeding Our Future later sued the agency, which continued reimbursing claims and approving new sites in the months that followed. A report by Minnesota’s nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor about the lapses that enabled the meals fraud later found that the threat of litigation and of negative press affected how state officials used their regulatory power.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6E8.XD-T.v2n3Pt6sve1Y&smid=url-share

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