Feds charge 15 people in Minnesota with defrauding government social service programs

By Andy Rose, Hanna Park, CNN

(CNN) — Federal charges were filed Wednesday against 15 people accused of defrauding social service programs in Minnesota, Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald announced Thursday.

The cases involve theft of more than $90 million in taxpayer money, McDonald said.

“This is not the end of our work in Minnesota. This is not the end of the beginning of our work in Minnesota. This is the beginning of our work in Minnesota,” he said.

The announcement came moments after Feeding Our Future founder Aimee Bock was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison on federal charges, including bribery.

Bock was one of the first people to stand trial in what federal prosecutors have called one of the nation’s largest Covid-19-related frauds, exploiting rules that were kept lax so that the economy wouldn’t crash during the pandemic. More than $250 million in federal funds was taken in the Minnesota scheme overall, with only about $50 million of it recovered, authorities said.

The other allegations outlined in court documents show one person is accused of defrauding the Federal Child Nutrition Program and a state program providing grants to child care providers, in part by falsifying the numbers of meals served to children. Another, accused of defrauding a state program that helps child care centers pay staff, is alleged to have inflated the number of staffers and their hours worked.

Some of the other cases involve allegations of Medicaid fraud. Two of those charged, responsible for providing housing services to people in need, are accused of defrauding Medicaid by inflating the hours of service they provided, according to court documents. And the owners of group homes for people with disabilities in rural Minnesota allegedly took more than $1 million in fraudulent Medicaid billings for personal use, an indictment says, including seven high-end cars.

The people charged are “fraudsters who treated Minnesota-run programs as their personal piggybank,” McDonald said.

Some charges also involved allegations that children were falsely being diagnosed with autism in order to receive government money, what McDonald called the “largest autism fraud scheme ever charged by the Department of Justice.”

The charges come three weeks after a federal official said 22 search warrants were executed in Minnesota as part of a long-running fraud investigation in the state.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz also spoke at the news conference in Minneapolis late Thursday morning.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was initially scheduled to go to Minnesota where he was expected to speak at this news conference. Instead, he met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill in an attempt to save the Justice Department’s “anti-weaponization” fund as the party weighs its fate.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

CNN’s Whitney Wild and Chris Boyette contributed to this report.

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