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Lets talk about the amateur expose of the Somali day-care industry in Minnesota.
Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet.
This video and associated clips have been taking the right-wing internet by storm. The format is new and interesting; a charismatic zoomer social media influencer teamed up with an angry obsessive boomer autist. Their idea was to show up in person to various government-subsidized "child care centers" to see if there was any meaningful economic activity going on. The results are certainly interesting if nothing else.
The most notable finding is the complete absense of evidence of child activity at all but one of the facilities. I'm not sure how definitive this is that fraud is occuring (especially since we don't know what time of day or week these visits were made), but it is certainly suggestive. I wouldn't be eager to display my entrusted children to a group of strange men who seem oddly interested in seeing them either.
One might get the impression that these facilities are completely unregulated and uninspected. This appears to be wrong. You can look up the licenses of Hennepin County child care centers and find annual inspection results, usually with violations! The laundry list of violations found with each annual inspection did not seem to prevent these facilities from recieving 7 figures annually in taxpayer funds.
My main question is how the hell did they pull this off? I work in a childcare service that receives government funding (along with charging parents fees) and it is one massive pain in the backside keeping track of all the paperwork (needing to be filed online through the national service provider portal for Early Years Programmes) to receive said funding.
It is not as simple as "hello, yes, we have 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each at $30 per hour, this is our bank account number, kthxbai". We get inspected by a couple of different bodies. We get surprise inspected/mini-audited and we damn well better have all our ducks in a row. If it turned out "why no, there aren't 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each", we'd be slapped down in a hot minute, the excess funding would be clawed back, and we might get shut down for good measure.
There must be more to the story than this. Otherwise it sounds like a counterpart to Rotherham: people had suspicions stuff was going on, but some people higher up the food chain shut down any awkward questions because that would sound like racism.
Doesn't reflect well on Governor Tim either, the man put forward as part of the Dream Team to save the nation from Orange Man Bad, much lauded for being the progressive governor of a well-run state.
If regulators are willing to turn a blind eye (potentially because of some greased palms) it's incredibly easy. My goto example is a green energy scandal. A company was (on paper) the second largest producer of biodiesel in the US. They were producing 0 gallons and just making numbers up in a spreadsheet to sell to other companies as green energy credits. The EPA had actually inspected their facilities and saw it was obvious they were producing nothing and did... precisely jack shit about it.
he only reason they were caught is because they were parking their sports cars all over their neighborhood, pissing off local families. The local families thought they were a drug dealer, and this triggered an investigation by local LEO that ended up blowing the whole thing up:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/owner-clean-green-fuel-sentenced-over-12-years-scheme-violate-epa-regulations-and-sell-9
An episode of the TV series American Greed covers the scandal in detail.
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I was wondering about this, thanks. I only found one license that didn't have a record of a violation. There also appears to be an increase in recorded violations the past two years compared to 2022-2023, although that's a glancing judgment. The licenses suggest they receive regular inspections if one doesn't think they are fraudlent. MN DHS claims it has categories of violations with different severity, and one could infer this from the descriptions of the violations on the licenses. It does appear like inspectors are liberal in documenting violations, but individual remedies are possibly unverified and consequences lax.
The public part of these inspections look like they are as well documented or better than food safety inspections. That doesn't mean they are taken seriously. It would make sense to me that the inspectors are cover your ass on the documentation, but lax on enforcement until a problem becomes a risk. I did not see a "center is registered for 90 kids and only 3 are present" violation.
As @hydroacetylene says this is the normalized, machine politics type of fraud. Yeah, if you really really want to you can technically call this fraud, but this is the cost of doing business. There might be more licensed daycare slots in Somali run childcare businesses than there are small Somali children in the Twin Cities* area. Maybe that could be improved, but mostly it is perceived as a good thing.
I should clarify that I'm in Ireland, not America, but I do find it hard to believe that American community services getting government (be that local or national) funding don't have to comply with broadly the same checks we do.
If you really can set up a "childcare centre" with no kids and get $$$$$ for it from the grateful local government, we are definitely all in the wrong lines of work.
There's no health and safety issue with children not being present in a facility.
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It was a major policy priority in Minnesota to help families financially by increasing access to childcare. If it turns out that certain demographics prefer to recieve that help in the form of kickbacks for locking their kids in a shitty warehouse every day, well, who are we to say that the policy is not working as intended?
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IIRC there was a Michigan scandal where a low income daycare scheme got shut down because some native blacks were just registering each others children and collecting paychecks. It happens pretty regularly in the US and the answer is often ‘corrupt machine politics’.
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