With the notorious theft of taxpayer dollars in Minnesota that you’ve heard so much about. The web of fraud that’s taken place, largely by residents from Somalia, siphoned billions from programs meant to help the vulnerable. But years before the national headlines, insiders were sounding the alarm about a system primed for abuse on a wide scale. Today, we hear from one of those whistleblowers. Then, how the crackdown has rippled through Minnesota’s Somali community.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Faye Bernstein: What I saw and what I was concerned about is that we had very risky practices. We had a great environment for fraud.

Long before you probably heard about Minnesota’s Somali fraud scandal, Faye Bernstein was blowing the whistle on a system she says was obviously ripe for fraud.

In 2019, Bernstein was a compliance officer for the Minnesota Department of Human Services — DHS — when she says she spotted red flags.

Bernstein: There was not any of the normal guardrails. There was nothing that would prevent that sort of thing. And then if I did point that out, or anyone else pointed that out, you were immediately targeted and you were the bad employee. And from that point on, there was nothing you could do. Everything you did was wrong.

Bernstein says managers at Minnesota’s Department of Human Services first pegged her as a troublemaker when she refused to approve seven problematic contracts.They totaled over a million taxpayer dollars. A colleague signed off on them anyway and Bernstein says she faced retaliation.

Bernstein: My job duties were lessened. I realized that I was being excluded, and then I would make meetings to speak to people about something that I needed to do. At that time it was a large, a large amount of opioid money. We were getting a lot of federal money to do with opioid. And so I would make meetings with coworkers that I had made meetings with many times and they would decline.

Sharyl: From what you gathered, would you think there’s a pretty good chance that there is fraud related to opioid money that’s gone out the door or other programs we haven’t yet focused on?

Bernstein: Oh, I can guarantee you there is in the opioid money. Yes. Yes.

Sharyl: Are we talking about tens of millions of dollars over the years?

Bernstein: Yes. Tens of millions of dollars. For instance, as my job duties were narrowed down to the level of collating, I continued to be paid out of the federal money and I shouldn’t have been. And there was many of us who were being paid out of federal money and we should not have been.

Sharyl: Because your jobs didn’t involve opioid resources?

Bernstein: Exactly.

Seven years after Bernstein began blowing the whistle, an independent audit in January confirmed ongoing shortfalls. It concluded that recently after scandal broke out, employees at Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, DHS, either “backdated or created” documents involving mental health contracts during the audit of their work. The audit ultimately concluded the agency “did not comply with most requirements” and “did not have adequate internal controls over grant funds.”

Reporter (January 6/KSTP-TV): Multiple DHS employees backdated or created documentation during that audit.

Shireen Ghandi, Acting DHS commissioner (January 6): If somebody directed staff to falsify documents, it is absolutely wrong not okay, you know, it is, it is an HR matter for sure, it may be more than that as auditor Randall discussed.

Another red flag: Minnesota’s Medicaid spending on autism services. It surged from about $1 million in 2017 to $343 million in 2024— without meaningful oversight.

Minnesota State Representative Kristin Robbins has heard from numerous whistleblowers. She heads up the legislature’s main fraud prevention committee.

Robbins says after state audits in 2019 exposed millions in childcare fraud, lack of action kept the system vulnerable to abuse.

Sharyl: Can you explain what you’ve unraveled about the connections between these scams, what they were, and how they are tied together?

Robbins: So this big explosive report came out and rather than saying, “Okay, go to town, go do all these criminal investigations,” the criminal investigation unit was shut down and they were told, “No, we’re not doing criminal investigations in childcare anymore. You can look at overpayments and then any overpayments you find can get referred to an overpayments committee and we’ll decide if we’ll seek reimbursement, but they were no longer pursuing criminal investigation or charges on childcare fraud.

Sharyl: What do you make of that?

Robbins: It’s astonishing, but that part is all new. Like I found out about that, you know, from a whistleblower in the last, I would say, five weeks. There was a group of people involved from the Somali community who created a group called the Minnesota Minority Childcare Association, and that group would try to lobby against changes that would tighten the internal controls. So anytime the legislature did come forward with a proposal to say, “Oh, well, we should tighten this up or tighten that up,” this Minority Childcare Association would say, “No, we shouldn’t do that. That will hurt our families. That’s, you know, not gonna work.” And many of those people who were involved in the Minnesota Minority Childcare Association then later, became defendants and charged and convicted in the Feeding Our Future Scandal. So the childcare led to the Feeding Our Future Scandal.

The “Feeding Our Future scandal” is the nation’s biggest known Covid fraud scheme. Prosecutors say Minnesota nonprofits, vastly run by Somali-Americans or immigrants, “falsely claimed to have served 91 million meals, for which they fraudulently received nearly $250 million in federal funds. That money did not go to feed kids. Instead, it was used to fund their lavish lifestyles.”

Robbins: And then the Feeding our Future sites, many of them had ties with autism centers or sober homes or non-emergency medical transportation or housing stabilization, and now we’re finding, adult daycare and assisted living. So it just kept mushrooming. But in the same network, in the same business model, all because there were no internal controls at DHS, low guardrails in these programs and a lot of money.

Total estimated Minnesota fraud: At least $9 billion tax dollars since 2018 across 14 high-risk welfare or social services programs. Nearly 100 people have been charged so far, the vast majority Somali Americans or immigrants. Two-thirds convicted in multiple interconnected schemes.

Sharyl: There are news articles that I recently saw that said the notion that there were these childcare centers without children was debunked by subsequent visits that showed there were children there and everything was fine.

Robbins: No. I mean, first of all, we’ve had the convictions on the record, but secondly I did a hearing in February of 2025 where I provided to the department a list of 72 childcare centers our staff had reviewed that we thought were problematic. To my knowledge, they didn’t do anything with it, and then Nick Shirley visited many of those same sites and, you know, now they’ve claimed they’ve gone and visited it, but our staff over two different years went to many of these sites and found the same thing, locked, boarded up, no evidence of even furniture, no evidence of a playground, no evidence of people being there. So I would say it certainly hasn’t been debunked.

Sharyl (on-camera): Amid the Somali fraud convictions—both real and damaging—Somali Americans and immigrants in Minneapolis told us they’re being unfairly painted with a broad brush. After a break, we’ll hear from some of them.

Watch the video here.