Vänce @garTHChrist - Twitter Profile

Minnesota Staff Fraud Reporting Commentary

1 day ago

We appreciate Liz Collin so much for standing up for ethics and integrity in our state. We can provide some insights into the questions people have about fraud: 1. To date, there are no protections offered to whistleblowers and concerns are still not being addressed. Retaliation is still present and staff who have raised concern about fraud are still being constructively removed. 2. Fraud was detected probably in 2012 or so, and blew up with childcare programs and concerns were quashed thus not to offend certain communities. Then in 2015, fraud reports hit the fan, retaliation started and DHS started to dismantle our audit/integrity work teams. Then in 2019, multiple Office of the Legislative Auditor reports highlighted the fraud concerns and staff started to speak out more and more - but DHS, especially Shireen Gandhi retaliated swiftly. 3. Main beneficiaries of fraud: Career politicians esp Tim Walz, his agency leaders/appointees, Keith Ellison, Peggy Flanagan, others. The people are politicians and their image needs to be preserved at all costs. Note - the average state employee HAS NO benefit from letting fraud blow up and we make NO money from fraud. In fact, we want fraud to STOP. That being said, there are isolated cases with some state employees getting some form of kickback from contracts/grants. 4. No state official has been held accountable for fraud in any meaningful way. Aside from Eric Grumdahl, basically every state leader who was in charge of the defrauded programs have new jobs, new titles and have washed their hands of the matter without any possibility of being held accountable through discipline, demotion, or legal charges. 5. Our programs are still ripe with fraud. We can see that our agency leaders are still telling "highly embellished" narrations of the changes we are making. But in reality, many MN DHS human services programs are still easily defrauded and our systems and staff aren't equipped to detect fraud. And certainly, our various hotlines whether it is the OIG or Internal Audits hotlines aren't meant to intake fraud cases nor be responded to appropriately. 6. We fully blame Keith Ellison's office for not taking a strong stance against fraud along with Tim Walz who played a vital role in continuing to distribute funds to fraudsters despite early warnings. 7. There is no other solution to tackling fraud in Minnesota without a full "flush of the toilet" of Tim Walz's administrators. These leaders fully knew about fraud but chose not to react because they had a career and image to maintain. 8. We agree that the feds should continue to withhold funds from Minnesota until it can be spent responsibly and money is still being defrauded even in non-high risk programs because our 1980's mainframe systems are not equipped to do fraud detection. 9. We believe that Hennepin County is an epicenter of fraud and the county is not doing enough to stop this fraud. We suspect that the county may be playing a role in supporting fraudulent activities. 10. Fraud isn't necessarily linked with race/ethnicity but we have observed certain patterns in some groups where news gets out about "easy money" so then everyone else follows suit. And with a state like Minnesota where it is said that "we need to get the money out the door as quickly as possible," we were actively told by our leaders to disregard our usual protocols to safeguard taxpayer dollars, especially prevalent with the American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Just ask Jodi Harpstead and her subordinates about the directive. It was also a way for MN DHS to deceive the federal government into believing Minnesota needed money thus we could extract more from the feds yet in reality, Minnesota was simply giving money out instead of really using the money appropriately. More to come.

25

598

193

74

63K

Vänce

@garTHChrist

Who to follow

Last Seen Users on Sotwe

Trends for you

Most Popular Users