ST. PAUL - Recently, the nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) unveiled a pair of scathing reports that found Minnesota taxpayers have lost hundreds of millions of dollars to government fraud due to inaction by Democrats in charge of the programs.
“The Walz Administration’s refusal to provide needed oversight to these programs has proven to be extremely detrimental to the state and its taxpayers,” Fogelman said. “You do not see fraud of this magnitude anywhere else, yet Democrat leadership just yawns and pooh-poohs the problem because it is never held accountable.”
Minnesota’s Frontline Worker Pay Program was the first to receive OLA review, and Fogelman noted auditors found the program was too rushed and lacked oversight. The OLA found that 41% of program applicants could not be verified, and that multiple state agencies did not even try to comply with best practices for verification. Ultimately, they approved payments to ineligible workers and applicants with fraud indicators without investigation. This included deceased applicants, people using temporary email addresses, and people who lived out of our state.
$500 million was set aside for our frontline workers who worked in-person during the pandemic, and roughly 500,000 eligible applicants would split that pool of money. Instead, there were over 1 million applicants approved which meant legitimate frontline workers received significantly smaller checks than they were likely entitled due to fraudulent applicants lessening available funding.
The OLA also released an audit into the Minnesota Department of Education’s (MDE) oversight of the Feeding Our Future program. Despite receiving more than 30 complaints into Feeding Our Future, the OLA found MDE refused to investigate or simply ignored them, and that these inactions created opportunities for fraud. MDE’s failure resulted in more than $250 million of taxpayer dollars being wasted. Fogelman noted the victims in this ruse were the children who actually needed the meals yet didn’t receive them.
“We should expect better from those elected to lead our state,” Fogelman said. The Democrats have total control of Minnesota’s government. They spent an $18 billion dollar surplus, raised taxes another $10 billion, and sat idly by while fraudsters ripped off nearly half a billion dollars from our taxpayers. To do next to nothing while this level of waste, fraud and abuse is occurring under their noses is pitiful and dishonorable.”
The Frontline Worker OLA Report can be found here, and the Oversight of Feeding Our Future OLA Report can be found here.