ST. PAUL – State Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine, proposes more oversight measures for Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program amid concerns of rampant fraud among funding recipients.
A new report indicates top CCAP recipients receiving millions of state dollars in Minnesota were cited for numerous licensing violations. The report also revealed concerns over attendance records, with repeated independent site visits failing to provide evidence of children or employees present at CCAP-supported locations. Ties to Feeding our Future, which was the subject of hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud in a separate pandemic-era scheme, also have been drawn to CCAP.
“This report simply confirms what many have known for a long time – that fraud continues to run rampant in our state government,” said West, the House Republican Committee chair on childcare. “It’s blatantly obvious entities in our state are receiving immense amounts of tax dollars even though we can all see they are not legitimate operations. We need a major overhaul of our CCAP system, with an emphasis on oversight. This is a major priority of mine, and I am proposing a three-pronged approach for adding scrutiny.
“First, entities that receive hundreds of thousands of CCAP dollars must be held to higher standards. This includes frequent, unannounced site visits to confirm legitimacy. We also need to adopt electronic record keeping to improve record keeping. The third measure I will propose in the House simply helps to ensure CCAP recipients file proper paperwork. Minnesota previously had an attestation law for CCAP, but Democrats stripped the penalty of perjury as a state recourse the last time they had full control of the Capitol a decade ago. This took the teeth out of enforcing program standards and rooting out bad actors, with apparent fraud chalked up to clerical errors.
“We tax our residents in Minnesota at some of the highest rates in the country,” West said. “The least we could do is make sure we don't give their money to fraudsters."
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