Whistleblowers have accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s administration of squashing criminal fraud investigations as far back as 2019, according to a Republican state representative who oversees fraud prevention in state programs.
Rep. Kristin Robbins, a Republican and chair of the Minnesota House’s fraud committee, told The Daily Signal that four whistleblowers inside the Department of Human Services’ Office of Inspector General revealed they were ordered to stop investigations after revelations of systemic fraud in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program.
The Office of the Legislative Auditor published the revelations in an April 2019 report, citing an Aug. 2018 email by Jay Swanson, manager of the Recipient and Child Care Provider Investigations Unit, that claimed large-scale fraud schemes in child care assistance.
“It was after that that his unit was told they can no longer do criminal investigations,” Robbins, who testified in Congress about the fraud on Wednesday, told The Daily Signal in a phone call Friday. “In the summer of 2019 they were told, ‘You can’t do search warrants, you can’t do criminal investigations anymore’.”
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That order to stop investigations “and switching only to investigating ‘overbilling’ and not fraud shows that they were willfully turning a blind eye to actual criminal fraud,” she argued.
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