An ex-Minnesota state trooper and former investigator in the Office of Inspector General for Minnesota’s Department of Human Services testified this week that state officials tried to get him to delete findings from a child care fraud report and later tried to shut down his department after “members of our unit were harassed and bullied by DHS officials.”
“I regularly joined with various investigators and agents as we interviewed the owners and employees of the child care centers being investigated,” Jay Swanson — who worked as a criminal investigator for the Services Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) under Minnesota’s DHS — testified.
Watch Below:
“More than once, I heard an owner or employee respond when we asked where they first learned about the daycare scam,” Swanson continued. “They would say they had first heard about it while in the refugee camp in Kenya.”
“These individuals told us that they had heard you could run the scam in a number of different states, but it was easiest, and you could make the most money doing it in Minnesota,” he added.
Swanson went on to say that during this time, “the DHS investigators and BCA [Bureau of Criminal Apprehension] agents initiated an investigation of another child care center and found a high amount of billing fraud.”
“Federal agents from the FBI, the IRS Criminal Investigation Unit, and agents from the U.S. Health and Human Services Office Inspector General were invited to join in the investigation due to some of the unusual activity and suspected crimes that we believe we saw,” he said.
“This investigation resulted in the federal indictment in 2017 of the owner of Salama Child Care Center. That owner eventually pled guilty and was sentenced in 2018 to two years in prison and was ordered to pay restitution of over $1.4 million,” Swanson explained.
“The Salama Child Care Center was located at 1411 Nicola Avenue in Minneapolis,” he added. “That address might ring a bell for some of you, because of a YouTube video taken last December at the ‘Quality Learing Center’ which was being operated at the same address.”
Swanson then recalled, “By mid-2018, our cases had generated some publicity, and the legislature then directed the office of legislative auditor to conduct a special review of the CCAP program.”
“In August of 2018, as I was preparing answers to questions posed to me by the OLA in an email, I was told by a DHS official to submit my answers to them instead of sending them directly to the OLA,” Swanson said.
“When I forwarded my answer regarding what fraud trends we were seeing in CCAP, as I had been directed, I soon had a senior DHS official in my office, angry, red-faced, and almost yelling. The senior DHS official told me to delete a number of paragraphs of the document that I had sent,” he added.
Swanson went on to testify that he replied by telling the official he believed doing so would be illegal and that “Minnesota law requires state employees to cooperate with the OLA and to turn over information as requested.”
“A few days later, the same official told me, ‘I just came from the commissioner’s office, and they’re sending your document to the OLA. You better be ready for the blank storm that’s coming your way,'” the former criminal investigator recalled.
“In the following months, members of our unit were harassed and bullied by DHS officials,” he added.
Swanson elaborated:
First, DHS paid $90,000 to a consultant with no experience in public benefit program integrity or financial fraud investigations to label the CCAP fraud allegations in my email as unreliable and unable to be proven. During an interview with the consultants, which became heated, I told them that I really didn’t care what they put in their report, but if they said there was no fraud or that our investigators were making this up, that when this became public, their company would lose all credibility. I told them that the fraud was so huge that sooner or later it would come to light.
Secondly, false derogatory information was placed on a supervisor’s performance review by DHS officials. Third, DHS implemented a continuous improvement program with the fraud investigation unit. This process started with the senior continuous improvement official berating our group for approximately 30 minutes, telling us in essence we were incompetent and terrible employees.
“I had never heard of something like this happening to any group of state employees in my 40 years in state government,” Swanson asserted, adding that “a DHS assistant commissioner was in the room watching this.”
“Over the next approximately six months, we were directed to attend many group meetings to discuss the investigative process at length, and we were given homework assignments to work on between the meetings,” he said.
“These meetings were led by the same DHS official who had berated us so badly in that first meeting,” Swanson added.
The ex-Minnesota state trooper went on to say, “The huge amount of time our team spent in those meetings and on our assignments resulted in investigators and supervisors being unable to conduct hardly any investigative activity over the roughly six months of this program.”
“As I look back with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, I realize that what our team saw was the early stages of a somewhat loosely organized criminal enterprise beginning to pillage Minnesota’s public benefits system,” Swanson said.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.