Over the weekend the Star Tribune published an op-ed column by Brandi Bennett on “Minnesota’s rapidly growing Fraud Hall of Fame.” The column is headlined “Welcome to the land of 10,000 scams.” Bennett ticks off the highlights:
We are already the epicenter of the Feeding Our Future scandal, the largest COVID-related fraud scheme in the country, with more than $250 million stolen under the guise of feeding hungry kids. Fake names. Fake meals. Fancy cars. First-class flights. All paid for by our taxes, while the Department of Human Services and the Department of Education dithered and looked the other way.
How about the autism therapy centers? Eighty-five of them are under federal investigation for overbilling Medicaid, another multimillion-dollar hole in our supposedly watchful welfare net. Then there’s the Child Care Assistance Program, where rampant fraud was reported as early as 2015, with millions siphoned off by providers allegedly inflating attendance numbers. Whistleblowers were ignored, oversight was nonexistent, and those who dared raise the alarm were treated as the problem.
Bennett’s column is good within limits. She recognizes highlights a scandalous situation and the role played by Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson in pursuing these cases: “No one has done more to shine a light on this disaster than acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson. He’s the man behind the prosecution of Minnesota’s most egregious fraud schemes, including the $250 million Feeding Our Future theft, the abuse of autism therapy reimbursements, and now the full-scale looting of the HSS.” Former United States Attorney Andrew Luger also should be credited for pursuing these cases during his tenure.
However, the limits observed by Bennett show how far we have to go to deal with the issues. She treats the state’s facilitation of these frauds as a function of “political naïveté, bureaucratic laziness and ideological vanity.” It sounds innocent, if misguided.
Bennett does not pause to note the absence of state authorities from the pursuit of these frauds. Where is the governor? Where is the attorney general? With their eyes averted, they have facilitated these frauds. They have barely answered a question about them. Minnesota’s DFL establishment is far from naïve and lazy. Crazy maybe, or crazy like a fox.
Bennett does not note that Minnesota’s Somali community is vastly overrepresented among the perpetrators of the frauds that have been charged or are under investigation, or that the community just happens to form a core Democratic constituency. Indeed, the investigation into the autism centers is a direct outgrowth of the investigation into the massive Feeding Our Future fraud case.
Bennett also overlooks the symbiotic relationship between the apparent perpetrators of these frauds and state and local authorities. Both the DFL establishment and the Star Tribune persist in immigration happy-talk that keeps the subject “well hid,” to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan in “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later).”
