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.
State Representative Pam Altendorf (R-Red Wing) called the news unacceptable.
“In these cases, the costs of fraud is anywhere from 30% to 50% of the funding,” Altendorf said. “We potentially lost up to a dollar for every dollar of real help being delivered. That is government malpractice on behalf of the Walz administration and the Democrats who refused to scrutinize the spending when all the warning signs were there.”
Altendorf said Minnesota’s Frontline Worker Pay Program was the first to receive OLA review. 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 fraudulent duplicate applications including many from people who were deceased long before this program opened.
Altendorf said a $500 million was set aside for our frontline workers who worked in-person during the pandemic, and that 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. Altendorf said MDE’s failure resulted in more than $250 million of taxpayer dollars being wasted.
“By refusing to do nothing, either when it came to reviewing applications or responding to complaints, the Walz administration not only condoned this fraud but practically invited it,” Altendorf said. “When a Democrat says there is no waste, fraud or abuse in state government, and that every dollar spent is spent wisely, laugh in their face. These two instances of incompetence alone have cost Minnesotans nearly half a billion dollars.”