Somehow, fraud in Minnesota has become the No. 1 news story in America over the past week. Now comes the hard part, separating the legitimate operations receiving taxpayer dollars from the fraudsters.
We use the phrase “waste, fraud, and abuse” to capture the full spectrum from malfeasance to misfeasance, and on to nonfeasance among vendors to state welfare agencies. Not all business practices and circumstances fall under the extremely narrow category of felony criminal acts.
How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?
As you are aware, the latest round of national scrutiny began last Friday with YouTuber Nick Shirley’s visit to ten Minneapolis-area state vendors, mostly childcare centers. His Boxing Day Twitter (X) post introducing his 42-minute video has garnered almost 135 million views.
The video posted on his main YouTube channel has earned almost 3 million views. Given the reaction, Shirley’s work would inevitably attract critics and detractors.
The Minnesota Star Tribune retraced Shirley’s steps in this piece published New Year’s Eve, under the headline,
We went to the day cares Nick Shirley did. Here’s what we found.
In my reading of the Star Tribune follow up, what they found was remarkably supportive of the Shirley video. They write,
The Minnesota Star Tribune also visited all 10 facilities, and found children inside four of them when invited inside. Six other facilities were either closed or employees did not open their doors.
Batting .600 is a pretty good average. But wait, there’s more,
[S]even of the eight facilities with publicly available licensing records have been cited by the state for violations over the past four years, with some cited dozens of times.
And,
Five of the 10 child care businesses Shirley featured in his video operated as meal sites for Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of a fraud scandal that has resulted in more than 50 convictions so far. Altogether, those five businesses received nearly $5 million from Feeding Our Future between 2018 and 2021, according to trial evidence.
Five out of ten is still a .500 average. And finally,
Fowsiya Hassan, identified in corporate filings as the chief executive officer of Minnesota Best, did not return calls for comment.
Earlier this year Hassan sued the state in federal court, claiming “selective” enforcement resulted in the closure of her former operation, Sunshine Child Care Center, after state officials raided the business as part of an overbilling fraud investigation.
I was the first reporter to cover that lawsuit, here. She and her co-plaintiff sued Tim Walz and the state of Minnesota for $46 million for shutting down their old day care businesses in a fit a racist-fueled animosity. That lawsuit is still being litigated.
Apparently, she just opened up a new day care, under a different name, and carried on as before.
Huh.
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