Under Tim Walz, Minnesota has become the most scandal-ridden state in America. So far, no one in state government has been held accountable for theft that has mounted into billions of dollars. Today, a first step toward accountability was taken by the Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and Oversight Committee, chaired by my friend Kristen Robbins. The Republican majority on the Fraud Committee issued an 84-page Final Report on its sixteen-month investigation. Whether the committee’s Democrats will have anything to say remains to be seen.
You can read the report here. I am still working my way through it, but in the meantime, what follows is just a portion of the executive summary. It is devastating to Tim Walz and his minions.
After two dozen hearings with dozens of witnesses, hundreds of whistleblower reports and reviewing hundreds of documents and reviewing years of Office of Legislative Auditor reports, it is clear that the breadth and depth of fraud in Minnesota is much worse than anyone thought possible, and stretches across multiple agencies in the Walz Administration. The Committee has concluded that:
• By 2019, senior officials in Governor Walz’s office, DHS, and Attorney General Ellison’s office knew that large-scale fraud was likely occurring in the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), and by 2020 within the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).
• The Walz Administration ignored and consciously downplayed shocking levels of fraud across more than a dozen Medicaid waiver programs, including EIDBI/Autism, Emergency Medical Transportation (EMT), Integrated Community Supports (ICS), sober homes, Adult Day Care, Assisting Living Services, and many others.
• Governor Walz created a culture that enabled fraud by failing to hold anyone in his administration accountable, despite years of credible whistleblower and OLA reports and actual federal criminal indictments and convictions. Instead of addressing the problem directly early in 2019 in the wake of the OLA reports on CCAP fraud, he downplayed or ignored the evidence and closed the criminal investigation unit that was having the greatest impact. Over the 8 years he has been in office, he has sought to shift blame rather than take responsibility and solve problems. A prime example was during the height of the Feeding our Future (FOF) scam, when Governor Walz tried to blame a court order for his failure to stop payments to fraudsters, despite significant evidence of fraud. This tactic was repudiated by the judge.
• When diligent and courageous government employees reported fraud and tried to get action, the Walz Administration ignored, demoted, and retaliated against whistleblowers, sometimes accusing them of being racists.
• Despite having sufficient authority to take action to prevent fraud and the authority to place new controls when necessary, the Walz Administration allowed the fraud explode to unprecedented levels.
• All of these failures have created opportunities for serial fraudsters to steal billions from Minnesota taxpayers across multiple programs for years. The Walz Administration has been lax and permissive, allowing indicted fraudsters and their associates to continue stealing from Minnesotans in other programs.
• This malfeasance and incompetence has cost Minnesotans $300 million in federal meals fraud and up to $9 billion in Medicaid fraud. These numbers do not include potential hundreds of millions more in fraud in childcare and SNAP benefits.
Democrats Have Created a Culture of Fraud
In the inaugural Fraud Committee meeting, we stated, optimistically, that “fraud is not a partisan issue.” This is certainly how Minnesotans feel – they are fed up with billions of their hard-earned tax dollars being stolen by criminals and they want accountability.
But, unfortunately, the past two years of oversight hearings have demonstrated that the Walz Administration does not take fraud seriously. They have failed to use the tools at their disposal to combat fraud – basic due diligence that Minnesotans assumed were part of routine internal controls and program management.
The record uncovered through our hearings has demonstrated that Democrats in the Dayton and Walz Administration prioritized getting as much money out the door as possible, with little regard to protecting taxpayers or vulnerable citizens in need of services. As Gov. Walz’s recently-appointed Program Integrity Director, Judge Tim O’Malley stated in his report and in our hearing on March 9, 2026, they “prioritized compassion over compliance.”
While most Democrats may theoretically oppose fraud, many in fact have come to accept fraud as a cost of doing business and are unwilling to spend the political capital necessary to stop the fraud.
More disturbing, our hearings also revealed that Democrats in the Dayton and Walz Administrations, as well as in the Minnesota House of Representatives, took steps to suppress findings of fraud. These issues will be discussed in detail in the report, but some examples include:
• DHS officials in the Dayton Administration attempted to suppress or alter an email from the supervisor of the Childcare Provider Criminal Investigation Unit regarding fraud to the Office of Legislative Auditor.
• DHS officials in the Dayton Administration made changes to a consulting report to reduce the estimated amount of childcare fraud.
• Early in the Walz Administration (March 2019), the Office of Legislative Auditor (OLA) released a report about fraud in the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP). Then-OLA Jim Nobles later wrote that former Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman told him “that House Committee Chairs had been instructed not to give OLA reports about fraud.”
• Rather than commit extra resources and attention to fraud prevention efforts in the wake of the OLA reports, the Walz Administration closed down the criminal investigation unit examining childcare fraud at DHS.
This complicit acceptance of fraud by the Democrat leaders allowed a culture of fraud to take root in Minnesota. Additionally, as has been widely reported, the vast majority of those indicted and convicted in the fraud schemes to date are from the Somali community. Of course, not all Somalis are involved in fraud, and we are always quick to point out that some of our best whistleblowers have come from the Somali community. Nevertheless, many of the fraudsters, who have demonstrated ties to Democrat politicians, came to believe that fraud was tolerated and paid in a big way. They saw friends and neighbors with political connections get rich by scamming Minnesota taxpayers, and very few have suffered significant consequences.
The Scale of the Fraud
Predictably, this culture of tolerance for fraud resulted in a staggering amount of fraud in Minnesota. Merrick Garland, President Joe Biden’s Attorney General, called Feeding our Future, the largest COVID fraud case in the country. Former Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson estimated that the fraud in 14 high-risk Medicaid program exceeded $9 billion. To put that in perspective, that is enough to give every adult Minnesotans a check for $1,969. $9 billion would also buy an average-priced home for almost 26,000 Minnesotans.
And $9 billion in Medicaid fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. That figure doesn’t account for more than $250 million in Feeding Our Future fraud in the federal school nutrition program and doesn’t include fraud in other program areas, such as SNAP benefits, childcare and dozens of grant programs.
Another way to measure the fraud is criminal prosecutions. To date, federal prosecutors have charged more than 90 people with fraud-related crimes, with over 65 convicted or pleading
guilty. They promise that there is much more to come.
However it is measured, it is clear that the scale of Minnesota’s fraud is both massive and
unprecedented.
More from the executive summary:
This report will demonstrate that two Democrat Administrations:
• Enabled fraud;
• Allowed fraud to continue by ignoring OLA reports, whistleblowers, and red flags; and
• Covered up fraud
The frauds were not difficult to perpetrate:
The Committee identified the same basic pattern used by criminals across multiple programs:
o Identify a program with significant federal money, no enrollment caps, and low barriers to entry.
o Enroll as a provider
o Set up a location, which could be a real business, inside an existing business or
simply an address in a coworking space, office building, apartment building, or
personal home.
o Sign-up recipients (real or fake);
o Start billing Medicaid
o Increase billing by forging attendance records, double-billing for services, and enrolling recipients in multiple programs (the Committee found these practices in NEMT, Interpretative Services, Sober Homes, Autism Services, Childcare, and others)
o Set up a shell company or related business (either for yourself or a friend) to bill for provision of service to your company to multiply the scale of the fraud
o Bill the shell company or related business for real or fake expenses, such as supplies, meals, transportation, and consulting.
o Add employees who are not needed, such as janitors, daycare workers or “behavioral technicians” to increase the amount of fraudulent billings and profit
o Pay kickbacks to get people to sign up or transfer to your businesses – the Committee saw this practice in the Autism, Adult Daycare, Childcare, and other programs.
o Set up a protection scheme – the provider requires payments from those it involves in the scheme or threatens them with exposure if they raise questions. We saw this with the Minnesota Minority Childcare Association and have had whistleblower reports of this same scam happening in Adult Day Services.
o Blunt criticism by journalists, whistleblowers, Legislators and anyone else by accusing them of being racist or Islamophobic, or threatening legal action.
Much, much more at the link. I am also gratified to see that the committee credited American Experiment several times for our work on the fraud issue, and quoted American Experiment Policy Fellow Bill Glahn’s testimony before the committee.
Given the extraordinary magnitude of the Minnesota frauds, most people would say that justice is not done unless some members of the Walz administration, perhaps including the governor himself, are criminally prosecuted. At the moment, I am not aware of any such prosecutions in the offing. We do know, however, that the U.S. Attorney’s office is preparing a new round of indictments relating to the Walz administration’s Medicaid frauds. Stay tuned.
