Federal prosecutors declared Thursday that a “culture of fraud” has overtaken Minnesota, revealing a tsunami of new scams that infected seven of the state’s Medicaid programs while stealing tens of millions of dollars.
Charges were announced against 15 people, accounting for $90 million in total fraud — but authorities said that was just the tip of what they expect to find.
The fraud was so bad that it bankrupted one state program to give housing assistance to the homeless, forcing the program to close.
In another case, a provider was claiming payments for a customer who never got the care and ended up dying, authorities said.
Scammers also gamed a Medicaid program to provide autism treatment for kids, paying kickbacks to parents to sign their kids up even though they didn’t need — and never got — treatment. It’s the largest autism fraud in history, authorities said.
“The fraud here in Minnesota is shocking,” said Colin McDonald, the assistant attorney general who runs the DOJ’s new fraud enforcement division.
SEE ALSO: Ringleader of Minnesota fraud gets 41 years in prison
The new prosecutions were announced just minutes after a federal judge announced a 500-month sentence — more than 41 years — for the woman who ran a massive pandemic fraud in Minneapolis.
Aimee Bock ran Feeding Our Future, which funneled $243 million to businesses that claimed they were feeding tens of thousands of children meals during the pandemic. In reality, few meals were served, and the money went to enrich the fraudsters, who were heavily drawn from the Somali community in the Minneapolis area.
“This is a vortex of fraud, and you were at the epicenter,” Judge Nancy Brasel told Bock at the sentencing.
The Trump team has declared Minnesota to be a test case for its ability to weed out fraud, particularly in such Democrat-led states that the administration says are less than cooperative.
The administration has swarmed investigators to the state and managed to produce the cases in just months — far faster than the years it usually takes to bring them.
“We’re going to normalize that speed,” said Christopher Raia, co-deputy director at the FBI.
In one case announced Thursday, an autism service provider, Smart Therapy, billed for more than 3,000 hours of caregiver services for a family. In fact, the family got no training at all, prosecutors charged.
Smart Therapy and Star Autism, another service provider for the condition, were paying kickbacks of up to $1,500 per month, per child, to families to let their kids’ names be used.
All told, the two firms billed $46.6 million and were paid $21.1 million from 2020 to 2024.
The housing stabilization program, when it began, was projected to cost $2.5 million a year. By the time it was shut down last year, it cost $104 million, “due to fraud,” Mr. McDonald said.
The autism program, meanwhile, went from $600,000 a year six years ago to $400 million.
In another case, a program paid for services for disabled people to be able to live independently in the community.
One firm was billing the government to provide 24-hour monitoring for a disabled person, but failed to deliver the services. The man was found dead — and the firm still submitted a bill for services, which authorities say it never provided, even after the man’s death.
Officials insisted their goal isn’t to discredit the assistance programs. Indeed, they said that’s what the fraud is doing.
Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and a member of the White House’s anti-fraud task force, said the programs require people to be forthright while applying.
“We set it up for a people who are accustomed to be able to trust their families and their neighbors and their friends to do the right thing, to be honest and not to try to bilk their fellow Americans,” he said. “It’s become clear that that social trust has been diminished and that people have taken advantage of these programs. Deterrence is how we restore social trust.”
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