The U.S. House of Representatives Oversight committee has done America a favor by issuing a 53-page staff report last week on fraud in Minnesota welfare programs. The full report can be read here.
As some have pointed out, if you have been following the fraud story closely for the past few years, the report may not provide a lot of new information. What the report does contribute are two things (1) collecting the information in one place and (2) publishing transcribed interviews with many of the top state administrators who presided over the scandals during the past seven years.
The report includes 166 footnotes, documenting its findings and conclusions. This attention to detail and full documentation represent the report’s biggest contribution to the fraud investigation.
The list of those officials interviewed by the committee appears on page 3 and includes top officials of the state Departments of Education and Human Services, and a former Chief of Staff for Gov. Tim Walz. Interview highlights begin on page 12.
As with the earlier Feeding Our Future (June 2024) report issued by the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA), the committee goes to great lengths to document who knew what when about fraud inside of the Walz Administration. The bottom line is that they knew all along but just wouldn’t do anything about it, despite having, at the time, all the authority needed to act.
Likewise, the committee (beginning page 16) builds on the OLA’ s March 2019 report on childcare program fraud.
The committee notes that its March 4 staff report is “interim,” as the investigation continues.
