"Perhaps most troubling, the audit found that DHS employees backdated or even created documents after the audit began, suggesting an attempt to retroactively fabricate compliance evidence. Legislators noted this was unprecedented in the auditor’s decades of experience."
Minnesota’s recent social services fraud controversies have exploded into national headlines, with viral videos, political rhetoric, and community tensions all fueling the narrative of a black-face of fraud. Much of the initial media attention — amplified by national outlets and social media — centered on alleged fraud at DHS contracted Somali‑run child care and DHS Contracted Medicaid Healthcare Insurance coverage providers. Yet longstanding, public evidence suggests this focus shifts attention from a deeper, more systemic problem: Systematic Racketeering. A nearly 80 year reign of serious oversight failures, internal fraud and criminal conduct within Minnesota’s own Department of Human Services (DHS), covered up with media spectacle and policies that systematically prevent reporting of fraud.
Performative Media Stories: Gov. Walz on Minnesota fraud: 'You commit fraud, you're going to prison'
Audits Reveal Internal Problems at DHS
In early 2026, the Office of the Legislative Auditor (OLA) released a blistering audit of the DHS Behavioral Health Administration (BHA), part of the agency responsible for overseeing millions of dollars in grants for mental health and substance use disorder medical treatment and supports. Auditors found widespread corruption in how grant funds were managed, including missing progress reports, inadequate oversight of grantees, and a lack of required monitoring documentation.
Perhaps most troubling, the audit found that DHS employees backdated or even created documents after the audit began, suggesting an attempt to retroactively fabricate compliance evidence.
Legislators noted this was unprecedented in the auditor’s decades of experience. This internal corruption has been devouring external communities for decades and they point to serious corruption and racketeering within the department itself . Yet the media presents DHS state contracted agencies tasked with caring for vulnerable Minnesotans as the face of fraud and intentionally does not make clear that DHS supplies these companies—applicants do not usually come to DHS with programs, DHS internal social workers, whom are under the governance of DHS commissioners, assign these fraudulent companies most often.
The First Acts of Fraud Are Foundational
Other Minnesotans receiving MinnesotaCare and Prepaid Medical Assistance Plan (PMAP) medical insurance are not subjected to social services or to having social workers make defining, primary decisions regarding their health care.
However, DHS, as an agency, is the first offender of fraud — inserting itself into disabled individuals’ medical choices via social services, simply because there is a great deal of money available through this source of medical insurance coverage, and these enrollees and participants have disabilities that make them easier to manipulate and abuse.
Many disabled Minnesotans who qualify for these healthcare delivery programs (as insurance options) — often because DHS was found brutally physically abusing disabled Minnesotans in DHS-operated healthcare delivery programs — do not require social services at all. Moreover, basic social services are not funded through these waivered insurance programs; a Minnesotan does not have to receive publicly funded medical insurance at all to receive social services.
So the natural critical thinking question is: why are the social workers there in the first place? The answer is that without the inclusion of social services, the Minnesota Department of Human Services does not have access to specifics or scope concerning individuals’ medical treatment, which allows the agency to control the funding, control medical conditions, and suppress fraud.
Social services are forced on Minnesotans who do not need them, and DHS is paid on all three points: basic social services, basic health insurance, and waivered insurance. Furthermore, they are supported by policy that allows them to operate as a “self-regulated” agency, with the power to systematically forbid disabled participants in the programs from submitting first-hand reports of fraud or from seeing what has been written by DHS employees when victims report fraud.
All of this discovery must be credited to President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and his DOGE initiative, and the instructions provided to their Republican base, which led the Minnesota GOP to create a "Whistleblower Portal" where fraud reports could be collected — and, of course, to the whistleblowers who have been telling the truth, only to suffer retaliation and silencing the entire time.
Department of Human Services Overreach as a Rule
The appropriate task for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, in their capacity of managing this enormous program — meaning publicly funded health insurance coverage for individuals with serious, persistent disabilities — is to conduct thorough, meticulous assessments so that proper information is on record for individuals to be connected to the right delivery services. They should:
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File paperwork on their end meticulously.
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Inform enrollees of all available options.
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Make informal suggestions during assessments and gain permission to set them up with specific DHS-contracted companies and vendors — not make medical decisions for them.
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Make themselves available for any questions these qualifying individuals have during the application and enrollment period.
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Check in at billing to verify that individuals have received the medical services, treatment, and equipment that has been billed, and ensure they do not need anything additional.
That is it. For people who do not require social services, this should be one assessment meeting and a reasonable number of planning meetings, similar to how family planning or life insurance providers discuss options. From there, interactions should be limited to billing and wellness check-in phone calls, with in-person visits only if warranted.
This process may be more extensive depending on the developmental, cognitive ability, and personal support systems of the enrollee — always with their permission. The amount of government funding wasted on providing social services where none are needed, in and of itself, ought to be a crime.
When Documenting Social Services Replace Support with Eugenic Control
Not only that, this inappropriate, unmonitored access, control, and power given to individuals who are underqualified and inexperienced in the practice of medicine to “rule over” vulnerable people creates a mindset of superiority and ownership over the caseload. It attracts individuals who do not understand healthcare but are more focused on the position of controller than on their actual responsibilities, which are primarily the filing and management of paperwork. The outcomes are endless: waste, errors, abuse, injury, and financial damage.
It is a culture of control reminiscent of colonization, using liberal language and unchallenged narratives to justify its behavior. It is able to persist because alternate, independent, self-determined thought is met with brutal, system-wide retaliation. This is the culture of the DHS workforce, and that culture oppresses disabled individuals receiving publicly funded healthcare insurance, even when social workers do not need access to those vulnerable people’s homes or medical decisions.
This culture is taught to the workforce from the top down, because the leadership is laundering the money. New employees are trained into fraud, and in fact, those who follow policy are often punished. This is what we know from thirty-eight years of daily experience interacting with all facets of this department.
In all of this, it is the disabled who are injured, the taxpayers who are cheated, and the complicit lawmakers, regulatory enforcers, and chronically, criminally corrupt and non-compliant Department of Human Services employment workforce, commission leadership and appointing governors who create these problems and retain sole control to decide what fixing them looks like — because what is lacking are transparency, boundaries, and equitable accountability in Roger B. Taney's liberal, progressive democratic governing strategy. What was once only for Black Americans has long since been extended to the disabled since the creation of Health and Human Services at the New Deal.
External Focus: Somali Community and Fraud Claims
Following mainstream media interviews by the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, framing fraud in Minnesota as a benevolent state being taken advantage of by East Africans, most local and national outlets and political figures amplified messaging that framed the issue as predominantly linked to the Somali community. This fueled trends among independent content creators, such as Nick Shirley, to go to daycare centers, filming outside and alleging fraud tied to Somali-run daycare centers. Many of those videos claimed to highlight empty buildings and bogus payment records. This, in turn, triggered federal agents to begin increased investigations into daycare centers and other health delivery facilities.
Added to this was white American DHS executive Aimee Bock, acting as an internal agent to facilitate comparably minor pandemic fraud schemes such as Feeding Our Future and Housing Stabilization Services.
Local media, law enforcement actions, and federal attention focused on this narrative, which sparked the perception that fraud was an East African reality, and coverage maliciously targeted an immigrant community already facing challenges and stereotypes—this is not to excuse founded fraud, irrespective of who committed it.
In fact, the opposite is the point of clarifying this issue. By focusing solely on comparatively new and minor instances of East African fraud, a false perception is created that, outside of these incidents, Minnesota is free of fraud and corruption. It is unacceptable to pretend that these racialized attacks are anything more than political farce. We cannot express outrage over millions of dollars in DHS fraud while ignoring billions in known, publicly reported DHS fraud.
We are also lying to Americans when we claim we are eradicating fraud, knowing full well that we have not addressed any of its facilitators—meaning nothing currently being done has real power to stop it. Moreover, this argument is framed as benevolent while knowingly displacing and concealing the true victims of these crimes: Minnesota’s disabled community. This is absolutely rotten behavior.
On Halloween Eve, 1949, Governor Youngdahl warned us that we should not return to our old ways of voodism, demonology, witchcraft, and fear from our Salem days, saying, “We must be on our guard that it does not creep up in other forms.” Unfortunately, today’s media farce is reminiscent not only of who we have been over the last eighty years, but of who we were at Salem.
Why Media Focus on Community Allegations Misses the Larger Issue
The core irony lies in the mismatch between media narratives and where the most serious documented problems appear to be:
1. Internal Misconduct at DHS:
The state audit found grant oversight discrepancies, backdated documentation, and other red flag corruption inside DHS itself — not external providers — suggesting systemic corruption, racketeering and external oversight weaknesses at the judicial and policy levels.
2. Misleading Emphasis on Ethnicity:
Stories emphasizing “Somali fraud” intentionally feed into eugenic based racialized narratives. While individual fraud cases have occurred, the backdrop of systemic internal fraud at DHS precedes, fuels and dwarfs these isolated actions and points to institutional criminality rather than resident corruption.
3. Policy Failure Overlooked:
Even media outlets that report on alleged fraud in healthcare delivery programs tend not to foreground the of internal financial falsification, non-complaint documentation, and audit obstruction inside the state agency charged with preventing fraud in the first place.
The Human and Policy Consequences
The very populations most harmed by these failures — people with disabilities, facing crisis, or families with low access to income—face the most severe consequences, injuries and financial impact when internal agency fraud isn’t prosecuted. Performative media focus not only distorts the public’s understanding of where the problems lie, it also shifts accountability away from the institutions entrusted with oversight. For example:
Audit findings show DHS failed to verify whether services were actually provided before paying grants.
Backdated or fabricated documentation undermines future efforts to ensure compliance.
Public perception may unfairly vilify entire communities instead of demanding systemic reforms from state agencies.
Get the Narrative Right
There is no excuse for fraud—wherever it occurs. But sound public policy and fair journalism must focus on all points of the trending fraud or leave the public—who is tired of being manipulated and lied to to by social structure they must be able to trust in order for it to stand—out of their political farce. Minnesotan's have been dying waiting on help to expose this fraud. Rather than heroes, we get politics resulting in higher body counts instead of protecting the disabled and American workers. In Minnesota’s case, internal criminal corruption within DHS rise to a level that demands accountability and new type of workforce—perhaps the ones that have been involved with it long enough to know the policies and procedures better than its own staff, the ones suffering from a 90% wealth gap, maybe they should have those jobs in order to do them with excellence for the benefit of all.
Minnesotans deserve more than intentionally misleading and isolated narratives about individual populations receiving fraudulent payments without focus on the workforce that supplied payments. After all, recipients did not violate the tax-payer, the non-compliant workforce allied support for it are the ones that wasted taxpayer funding. Had they done their jobs to regulations the fraud would not have mad it to payment. These actors knew that and exploited it—as every population that came before them and everyone to follow as long as we hold true to our eugenic philosophy that punish and promote people for who they are, rather than the acts they commit.
Instead of framing the controversy as a “Somali witch hunt,” Americans — and Minnesotans in particular — deserve balanced coverage that highlights root causes, institutional responsibility, and real reform blueprints beginning with public exposure and punishment for all internal actors. The should be lined up like Hitler's guard and made to testify about what they did, saw and heard. Only then can the state truly improve its system of supports for the vulnerable and ensure integrity in programs meant to protect them.
References
Office of the Legislative Auditor. (2026, January 6). Performance audit of Minnesota DHS Behavioral Health Administration grants (report excerpt). Office of the Legislative Auditor. https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/
Bring Me The News. (2026, January 7). Audit: State workers made “systemic effort” to fake documents after mismanaging money. https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-news/audit-state-workers-made-systemic-effort-to-fake-documents-after-mismanaging-money
Minnesota Reformer. (2026, January 7). Another nexus of fraud? Auditor zeros in on drug, mental health grants. https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/01/07/another-nexus-of-fraud-auditor-zeros-in-on-drug-mental-health-grants/
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