Former prosecutor exposes massive Minnesota government fraud failures

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Minneapolis has been at the center of national headlines in recent weeks over a massive fraud scandal that experts say will cost taxpayers over a billion dollars. Fox News Digital spoke to a former prosecutor who worked on one of the central cases in the controversy.

Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab, who served nearly four years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and briefly worked on the Feeding Our Future case, says the public still doesn’t grasp the scale, speed, and simplicity of the fraud that unfolded, or how deeply government failures contributed to it.

“I think you generally have a sense that your government is gonna be fighting for you and spending your money just generally okay, and that was absolutely not the case,” Teirab told Fox News Digital.

“The amount of fraud was rampant, it was staggering, and happened really, really quickly. Just over the course of a couple years, the amount of fraud that happened in Minnesota is maybe in excess or probably in excess of a billion dollars, and one of the main prosecutors in a lot of the fraud, the former acting U.S. attorney Joe Thompson, said the number was likely over two billion dollars. So that is what we’re dealing with. It’s a travesty that our hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being wasted away.”

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The scheme that has garnered most of the national attention involved the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which misappropriated $250 million in COVID-19 funds. But the fraud within various government agencies in Minnesota goes far deeper, Teirab explained. He asserted that the system was set up in a way that made it possible, and relatively simple, for various nonprofits to scam the government out of over $2 billion when it’s all said and done.

“When I was on the Feeding Our Future case, the big thing that jumped out to me was honestly how easy this fraud was to do,” Teirab told Fox News Digital. “I mean, these fraudsters were just saying that they were spending all this money on feeding kids, and they were just making up these PDFs, putting false names into Excel sheets. I could do that in five minutes on a computer if I had absolutely no conscience.”

Ultimately, Teirab explained, the social services system in Minnesota was set up in a way where it was designed to fail.

“So the bottom line of this scandal was this: that there were supposed to be these different organizations, like Feeding Our Future, they were supposed to be a sponsor of different food sites that would give out food to kids who purportedly need it,” Teirab. “And so this Feeding Our Future was supposed to be the watchdog of these food sites. But they were not doing that at all. They were basically getting kickbacks from these sites that were supposed to be giving up food. That was totally false. And they were ginning up the numbers and saying that they fed 3,000 kids a day when they actually maybe fed zero or maybe three kids.”

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The fraudsters, largely but not exclusively consisting of the city’s Somali population, coordinated casually as they discovered how effortless government reimbursement could be, Teirab explained.

“These people were chatting with each other, and figured out, hey, I can get this free money,” Teirab said, while explaining that the fraudsters and over 70 people facing indictment were the main perpetrators but that government officials also deserve blame.

“Tim Walz was responsible for putting into place the commissioners of the different departments who are allowing all this money to go out, and then you had Keith Ellison, who not only should have done something about stopping the fraud once he had a sense that things were happening, he should have started to investigate it, he now tries to say that he was working hand in hand with the federal government… absolutely false, lying about what he did, what he knew and when he knew it,” Teirab said.

Walz’s office, in a statement to Fox News Digital this week, said that the governor “views addressing fraud as a top priority” and touted his work over the last three years making “systematic changes to state government” to stop it, including hiring investigators, auditors, and law enforcement. 

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“The Governor has brought in an outside firm to audit payments to high-risk programs at the Department of Human Services (DHS) and created a specialized fraud fighting law enforcement unit at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Walz’s office said. “He has installed new leadership at DHS with a single-minded focus on stopping fraudulent payments. Many of the changes have not been flashy or headline-grabbing, but rather just the hard work of building stronger safeguards throughout state government.”

Teirab, who ran for Congress in 2024, told Fox News Digital he takes issue with elected officials who have presided over the fraud situation, which has been developing and reported on since at least 2020, telling the public they are on top of it. 

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“On the Democrat side, they’re trying to deflect and say it’s not a big deal, or we were actually working with you the whole time, and we’re taking this very, very seriously,” Teirab said. “And it’s absolute hogwash.”

“Tim Walz didn’t do enough, Keith Ellison didn’t do enough, and Ilhan Omar didn’t do enough either, because she for sure knew what was going on. She was actually in one of the government’s exhibits, I believe, in one of the trials,” Teirab continued. “She had one of her political victory parties at one of the main restaurants at the heart of the Feeding Our Future scandal in 2018. It’s just ridiculous, and hopefully we should all come together and say this kind of fraud shouldn’t happen.”