A former state trooper who ran fraud investigations inside Minnesota's Department of Human Services told state lawmakers Tuesday that senior officials ordered him to delete findings, harassed his unit, and tried to shut down probes into what he now calls an organized criminal enterprise looting the state's public-benefit system. His testimony landed the same day federal agents raided more than 20 businesses in Minneapolis as part of a widening crackdown on suspected fraud in publicly funded childcare and nutrition programs.
Jay Swanson, who led a DHS fraud investigations unit from 2014 to 2018, appeared before the Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee with a blunt account of institutional failure. He described a pattern in which investigators flagged large-scale fraud in the Child Care Assistance Program, only to be met with hostility from the very officials who should have acted on the evidence.
The twin developments, sworn testimony about a cover-up nearly a decade old and a major federal enforcement operation on the same day, mark a dramatic escalation in a scandal that has already drawn scrutiny to Governor Tim Walz's oversight of the state's anti-fraud apparatus. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson announced in December that federal authorities estimated fraud in Minnesota Medicaid programs may have cost taxpayers as much as $9 billion since 2018.
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