Ernst: Learing Lessons from Minnesota’s Fraud Ring
An audit found Minnesota paying millions of dollars for fraudulent child care services – nearly a decade ago!
At that time, the state’s nonpartisan legislative auditor warned more needed to be done to combat child care fraud, including verifying attendance.
Apparently, the state didn’t lear any lessons from that scandal, but the fraudsters certainly did.
Just last year, a federal inspector general review found that once again “Minnesota’s limited oversight of attendance documentation at child care centers” was costing taxpayers for services that weren’t being provided.
Then 23-year-old YouTube journalist Nick Shirley blew the lid off a widespread scheme by going door-to-door at child care centers in Minneapolis, revealing multiple centers with few or even no kids, despite being paid millions of dollars to watch hundreds of children.
One of the empty facilities that received $1.9 million from taxpayers last year, the Quality Learing Center, abruptly closed after Shirley’s visit.
You read that correctly, folks, “Quality Learing.” Clearly, no quality learning actually was occurring here.
It’s no coincidence that another child care located at the same exact address as the Quality Learing Center was raided by the FBI a decade earlier for fraudulently claiming to be caring for more children than were on site and even billing for days when it was closed.
Nevertheless, the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families continues to claim the child care centers in question are “operating as expected.”
Apparently, stealing from taxpayers and defrauding children’s assistance programs is “operating as expected” in Tim Walz’s Minnesota.
In fact, the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the nation occurred in Minnesota, using the exact same formula as the Quality Learing Center. An astounding $250 million intended to feed hungry children was stolen by cooking the books to inflate the number of meals served and fabricating the names of fake children. Rather than feeding kids, the money paid for luxury vehicles, international travel, and real estate, including a beach property in Kenya and another on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Showing no remorse, the fraudsters actually attempted to bribe a member of the jury in their criminal trial!
Where was the state’s political leadership while this was going on? Congresswoman Ilhan Omar held a photo op at the Safari Restaurant, which fraudulently claimed to have served millions of meals as part of the scam.
Millions more were ripped off from Minnesota’s Housing Stabilization Services (HSS). Some of the fraudsters moved from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to the state after they “heard that Minnesota’s HSS Program was a good opportunity to make money.” The housing program, funded through Medicaid, was expected to cost $2.6 million a year. Instead, the payment claims ballooned from $21 million in 2021 to $104 million in 2024—a 400% increase in three years!
Another $14 million was stolen from an autism program by a shady organization in the state that paid cash kickbacksto parents for signing up their children who did not have autism. Medicaid was also billed “on behalf of providers who weren’t actually working there or who were traveling at the time the therapy was purported to have taken place.” The amount the state was paying for autism services skyrocketed by 3,000 percent in just five years as the number of providers increased 700%.
A longtime career employee at the state’s Department of Human Services (DHS) says she was retaliated against by her supervisors for raising concerns about tax dollars being vulnerable to fraud. A former supervisor at one of the autism centers also “made repeated attempts” to report the fraud to the DHS Inspector General (IG), but nobody responded.
The DHS IG conceded, “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud,” and adding that, “the magnitude cannot be overstated.”
Well folks, ignoring fraud won’t make it go away! In fact, that only invites more.
The Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota estimates the fraud in the state could end up costing taxpayers more than $1 billion.
To borrow from Winston Churchill, those that fail to lear from history are doomed to repeat it. And Minnesota is a repeat offender for sure.
For allowing scammers to take food from the mouths of children and rip off taxpayers, I am giving my January 2026 Squeal Award to Minnesota Governor Walz.
To stop the fraud, I am also introducing the Putting an N to Learing about Fraud Act, which will put more safeguards in place to detect scams early and require the recovery of any money ripped off from taxpayers.
The swindlers in Minnesota and everywhere else soon are going to lear the hard way that in the era of DOGE, crime no longer pays.
Joni Ernst, a native of Red Oak and a combat veteran, represents Iowa in the United States Senate.
Click here for an official portrait of Senator Ernst.
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