This time, it was a Medicaid fraud, involving the personal care assistance (PCA) program and occurred in state court. But otherwise, the result is the same.
From the Minnesota Star Tribune,
Guilty plea in largest Medicaid fraud case in state history nets probation, $2.2 million penalty
Probation. The Star Tribune reports,
Said Awil Ibrahim, 26, of Minneapolis, pleaded guilty on May 1 in Hennepin County District Court to two counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle over $35,000 and agreed to help officials pursue and prosecute his codefendant, Abdirashid Ismail Said, the alleged mastermind of the fraud.
How does Mr. Ibrahim propose to “help”? His confederates in crime have fled the country.
The case has attracted a great deal of notoriety after Said fled the country ahead of his jury trial last month. Another codefendant has never been detained and is believed to have fled the country during the investigation.
As for Ibrahim,
He agreed to pay $2.2 million in joint restitution and will be placed on five years supervised probation. His 150-day jail sentence will be stayed as long as he complies with probation and sticks to a payment plan that will be determined at sentencing.
A total of $11 million was stolen from Medicaid by the three men. My guess is that the total recovery, rounded to the nearest integer, will be $0.
According to his plea, Ibrahim paid himself more than $500,000 and defrauded the state of $2.2 million over two years.
As to Mr. Said, the Star Tribune reports elsewhere,
A defendant jumped bail in an $11 million fraud case. Did the courts make a mistake?
Was that a rhetorical question? Because of course they did. The Star Tribune lays out the timeline where “ringleader” Abdirashid Said showed up for every court appointment until the day he didn’t and fled the country.
The Star Tribune notes,
In Minnesota, everyone has a right to bail — even those charged with defrauding the government of millions of dollars.
But you don’t have to make it easy for them. The law does not require that. The backstory,
In 2023, Said and two co-defendants were charged in Hennepin County with racketeering and eight counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle for defrauding the state’s Medicaid program of $11 million. Said was also charged with perjury. Months earlier, he had been convicted in a separate Medicaid fraud case.
But he’s “entitled” to unconditional bail of a mere $150,000 of which he only has to put up $15,000. Some insurance company is on the hook for the rest. He’s not alone,
Said is now a wanted man. He is not alone in that; as of February there were 18,000 active warrants in Hennepin County for people alleged to have committed crimes, not appeared in court or violated probation.
We’ve seen the last of Mr. Said. Those readers of a certain age will recall the 1970s TV cop drama Beretta, staring Robert Blake. The show had a tag line, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”
What time?
Also from the Star Tribune this week,
We’re all drowning: Fraud allegations swamp investigators
The poor dears.
Minnesota officials are seeing a massive spike in new reports of fraud in social services programs, overwhelming the ability of investigators to handle all the cases.
That’s led state authorities to farm out more cases to federal investigators, and delayed their ability to hold providers who committed fraud accountable.
Here’s a thought: if the investigators (or their predecessors had taken the issue of fraud seriously at any point in the past decade, it would not have reached this crisis state. The inspector general reports,
It’s a volume issue. And it’s also an issue that investigative capacity, technological capacity, has not … [had] a corresponding increase to meet the volume we’re facing.
The IG adds,
There’s not enough people in the world, right, to oversee $20 billion of spending. We need to have modernized technology.
The spike did not come out of left field. It built year on year from looking the other way. The purpose of the article is a plea for more money and bigger budgets. But there is also the problem of rewarding the very people whose inaction created the problem.
Rinse and repeat.
