Brehm: Minnesota deserves answers to questions raised by this viral fraud video

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Minnesotans are known to appreciate the local angle in national news stories. That perspective certainly shows up in this newspaper a lot. It makes sense. We’re proud of our state. And we like living here. Minnesotans like me enjoy when the country is talking about the special place we call home.

But in recent days, there was no local angle to the biggest social media story out there — 23-year-old YouTuber Nick Shirley’s viral video documenting apparently egregious displays of day care fraud being perpetrated in Minnesota’s Somali community. No, Minnesota was the entire angle of the story. And the picture was not pretty.

When it comes to the monetary enormity of the fraud committed in Minnesota in recent years, our ability to be shocked has probably passed. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, which has the most credibility of any agency on this issue, has already predicted the total could be nearly $9 billion in stolen taxpayer dollars. That’s nearly 2% of Minnesota’s annual GDP, and is real money you and I work hard for that is meant to help needy Minnesota families. It’s only natural to be outraged that our state government let so much of it fall into the hands of fraudsters. My blood has been boiling for a while now.

But what made it boil even more was what stood out to me while watching Shirley’s video, which has over 100 million views on X: how extraordinarily little Minnesota state government does to prevent this kind of obvious fraud from happening. And by little, I mean nearly nothing. You’d almost think the Walz administration just didn’t really care. It was painful to watch an out-of-town kid do the kind of simple due diligence in a single afternoon that state agencies should have been doing with rigor for years.

In one now infamous scene, Shirley visits the Quality Learning Center in south Minneapolis, which the video notes has received roughly $4 million in funding from the state. But while the facility is apparently licensed for 99 children, Shirley could not find one. He visited other state-funded day care sites around the city, too, and found them to also be absent of minors, the reason they receive our tax dollars in the first place. It was alarming and compelling footage.

But what we do know is that it would not be hard for a day care facility in Minnesota to perpetrate the kind of fraud Shirley believed he recorded in his YouTube video. As former state legislative auditor Jim Nobles recently wrote on these very pages: “For example, we saw documents — paper attendance sheets filled out by child care staff and used to claim payments from the state — that were suspect on their face. Yet the state paid the claims without any independent verification of how many children had been served. This permissive approach made it easy for fraudsters to steal.”

Even if these facilities are indeed serving actual children, which I find hard to believe, it’s still hard to comprehend how they are receiving tax dollars to do so.

The Quality Learning Center referenced above is so incompetently mismanaged that they spelled “learning” as “learing” in the sign over their front door. Did Walz’s inspectors, who claim to have visited the site, notice that before sending them more checks? During its first licensing review in 2022, the center racked up more than 25 violations and continued to be flagged for numerous violations over the years apparently without funding consequences. This day care, if not up to malfeasance, is enough of a dump to have gone out of business long ago. But public money likely kept it afloat.