As scrutiny intensifies over how fraudsters in recent years bilked Minnesota safety net programs out of hundreds of millions of dollars, officials in Gov. Tim Walz’s administration have been meeting monthly to share data and develop best practices in an effort to prevent fraud in public programs, they said during a briefing Monday.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension highlighted the duties of the Office of Inspector General Coordinating Council, which Walz established through a September executive order.
Officials held the briefing days after a federal prosecutor estimated that fraud in state-run Medicaid programs since 2018 could total over $9 billion. Since then, Walz and officials with the Department of Human Services — which administers the Medicaid programs — have cast doubt on the prosecutor’s estimate.
On Friday, Walz said the $9 billion fraud estimate was “sensationalized,” publicized without evidence and a number created by the Trump administration.
“You’re seeing a weaponization. We’ll continue to fix (the fraud). They’re going to continue to come up with numbers that don’t have it there, and it’s sensationalized. I don’t expect anything different from this administration,” said Walz, whose campaign for a third, four-year term has been severely complicated by all the fraud revelations in the past 18 months or so.
BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, who chairs the new council, said they are facilitating better communication among state agencies, discussing emerging issues that the departments are seeing and creating statewide improvements.
“The goal of this work and this council is to really look towards a prevention framework,” Evans said.
DHS Inspector General James Clark was also on the call, and reporters asked him about the estimated $9 billion in fraud since 2018 throughout 14 “high-risk” Medicaid programs being audited by the state.
“Nothing I’ve seen indicates the $1 billion of fraud or the $9 billion of fraud figures that have been cited,” Clark said. “I do have concerns that people will repeat that figure as fact.”
In July, the Reformer asked Walz at a news conference whether he agreed with the federal prosecutor’s then-$1 billion fraud estimate, and the governor said “yes.”
State agencies, according to a new state law, must report incidents of suspected fraud involving state-funded programs with losses of $10,000 or more to the BCA.
Evans said the BCA since last year has received about 200 reports of suspected fraud from state agencies. Most are related to Medicaid, Evans said, and the BCA is actively investigating about a dozen of those cases.
This year was the first year this reporting requirement was in place, and a report will be published in February documenting more about these incidents, according to the BCA.
