Flashback: “‘Some Measure of Fraud’: The Privileged Democratic Remark of DHS Former Commissioner Jodi Harpstead During Oversight Hearing

In a moment that has since reverberated far beyond the hearing room, Minnesota Department of Human Services Commissioner Jodi Harpstead publicly characterized fraud within the state’s human services system as something to be expected. “That’s why they call it human services; we would always expect to have to deal with some measure of fraud,” she said—an assertion delivered not as a warning, but as a rationale. To critics, the statement laid bare a troubling posture at the top of one of Minnesota’s most powerful agencies: a non-vestment in preventing fraud altogether and determining how much misuse of taxpayer dollars and lifelong injuries to Minnesota's disabled citizens is acceptable.

At a time when DHS oversees billions in public funds intended for the Medicaid Medical Insurance Health Plan and Olmstead related Healthcare Delivery Options for vulnerable populations, the remark struck many as both absurd and audacious. Rather than affirming a commitment to enforcement, accountability, and prevention, the comment suggested institutional participation in citizen loss—raising urgent questions about governance, oversight, and whose interests are ultimately being protected when fraud is framed as inevitable rather than unacceptable as if specific DHS procedural regulation does not exist.

Minnesota DHS Commissioner Jodi Harpstead comment “That’s why they call it human services; we would always expect to have to deal with some measure of fraud.” Openly admits that DHS’s focus is not the prevention of fraud but how much fraud of taxpayers’ dollars should be tolerated—whether taxpayer dollars should be spent on controlling fraud—as if every service provided by DHS is not regulated with specific guidelines, procedures, policies, and legal regulations for each of its staff departments and department employees to follow, and cannot be corrected when any staff department and/or staff employee dissents from those guidelines, procedures, and policies or violates those regulations.

Along with the focuses of each governor, each commissioner, landmark Ombudsman’s reports, multiple class-action lawsuits, detailed breakdowns of the Olmstead Plan, and real media with real victims and insider records still to drop—which Bearing Witness has already brought to the public—it should be easy to understand why victims of DHS fraud and abuse are systematically forbidden from reporting fraud and abuse themselves. They are systematically forbidden from seeing what, if anything, concerning abuse and fraud has been documented when they call the only party the state allowed them to contact prior to the 2024 election of Donald Trump, who put Elon Musk in place to bring us DOGE.

The Republican agenda encouraged the Minnesota GOP to create a whistleblower documentation link, and it is for that reason that the public is hearing about the inner workings of DHS and bringing these people into the spotlight—which, for us here at Bearing Witness, is a major problem and, in fact, the elephant in the room at all these trials. All of these individuals present are aware that outside of the GOP document link connected specifically to the current presidential administration, there remains no system or ability for Minnesotans to make firsthand reports of abuse and fraud of vulnerable adults in the state of Minnesota.

These issues must be dealt with together because fraud in this system comes in the form of DHS staff and hired companies who have direct care over Medicaid health insurance plan enrollment for waivered healthcare and other healthcare delivery options connected to the state’s court-ordered Olmstead Plan, dissenting from policy and procedure, falsifying documents, omitting data from documents, and intentionally billing for services never delivered. The “enrollees” are the first to know; they know the day it occurs.

Can you understand now why articulate enrollees are not in any of these structural meetings or even in accountability hearings? Do you understand why media reports multiple companies and programs being shut down, but we’ve only now reached an account for approximately nine victims of DHS fraud in the state, with four of the victims only coming out as having been denied services and pushed into homelessness since the East African investigations have begun—yet Bearing Witness has brought you 18 years’ worth of legal actions pertaining to fraud and abuse?

Do you comprehend that there is a specific procedural process for any daycare center or health delivery option, such as Home Stabilization Services, which majorly white workers of DHS are regulated to follow step by step for approving companies? (Companies cannot commit fraud if they’re not approved, so DHS is the one responsible for creating fraudulent companies, not outside agencies. We have one key white DHS worker on the inside who actually committed the fraud that caused taxpayers to be victims of shell companies—she is Aimee Bock. But Aimee worked for Commissioner Jodi Harpstead, who was appointed by Governor Tim Walz. Neither have lost their jobs or any of their powers.)

And so, as governors and commissioners in the state of Minnesota, we have no incentive for preventing fraud because there are no career or financial consequences when we’re caught committing fraud or when fraud happens on our watch—where we are collecting lucrative salaries and career-advancing titles to enforce regulation and select individuals who will enforce regulations. This has been the case throughout the history of disability in the state of Minnesota by historical record, which we at Bearing Witness have already brought to you via YouTube and on our website.

Do you understand that, just like any of you pay bills, we pay a bill based off a summary of usage, and within DHS there are regulations which the employee who receives that bill must follow to “verify that usage”—mainly calling the enrollee prior to sending the bill to the payment department? And there is a regulated procedure which the DHS payment authority must follow prior to releasing the check—mainly asking the prior employee, “Did you verify this, and is the usage correct?” Each of these employment positions has a supervisor and superior all the way up to the governor.

Do you also understand that, for the most part, enrollees do not enter DHS with a company; DHS assigns the very East African companies that are now being coined the face of fraud to the enrollees? It was DHS who were defrauding the companies as well as the participants and families, the federal government, and the taxpayers. This has been the case—abuse and fraud—by historical record since at least 1949, when then-Governor Luther Youngdahl gave his farce of a Halloween media spectacle at the burning of restraints to present the public with the message that Minnesota had turned from its puritan voodism, demonic witchcraft that utilized the disabled for its own personal comfort and gain.

Be clear: we do not excuse those actors who attempted to outwit the corrupt enterprise Minnesota Incorporated, May 11, 1858, with respect to its Department of Human Services, which first outwitted them by joining what they could not beat. These individuals did not have the national or state history to know that you cannot out-fraud a fraudster, or out-rebel the world’s greatest rebel nation of modern times. We are only bringing the public the full picture—not a portion that fits status quo eugenic philosophies that succeed by occulting clear facts.