Officials in Maine have suspended state Medicaid payments to a Somali-run charity after more than a million dollars in possible fraud was discovered in several audits of the charity’s services.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has cancelled MaineCare payments to Gateway Community Services after the audits found that the charity over billed the state for $1,068,598 from March 2021 through December 2022. The cash was supposedly to cover the costs of “interpreting services” to Somali migrants, the Bangor Daily News reported.
This same organization has been under investigation before. Gateway reportedly overbilled for more than $600,000 between 2015 and 2018, and is still under a cloud of suspicion for other violations found during a third state audit completed in 2024.
The suspension of funding comes on the tail of the red flags thrown up about the charity by U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, who warned the U.S. Treasury of welfare fraud being committed by Gateway.
Gateway was founded in 2015 by Somali migrant Abdullahi Ali who became the subject of scrutiny for launching a 2024 bid to run for president of Jubaland, an autonomous region in the southern part of Somalia, at the same time his Gateway Services charity was defrauding the state of a million in improperly billed services.
Gateway was not only staffed and run by Somali migrants, though. The agency also has connections to a number of prominent Democrats in Maine, including Democrat State Senator Chloe Maxmin, and Democrat strategists Joanne D’Arcangelo and B.J. McCollister, the latter of whom served in the Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for the White House and a chief of staff to Maine Democrat Senate President Troy Jackson.
Assistant Maine Senate Minority Leader Republican Matt Harrington has been raising concerns about Gateway and other possible MaineCare cheats since May.
“This is taxpayer money, and we should be looking into this, and I’m relieved that the federal government is finally stepping in, I think, largely due to the inaction of the leaders in Maine,” Harrington said.
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