ST. PAUL, Minn.—Erin Campbell, Minnesota’s top financial officer, told a state anti-fraud committee at the state Capitol on Jan. 21: “Unfortunately, there’s not a ‘silver bullet’ to stop the type of fraud that we’ve seen in our public-assistance programs.”
The lack of a quick fix is largely because “state government is about as complex as it gets,” Campbell told the Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee.
That bipartisan committee of eight state representatives began meeting nearly a year ago to tackle large-scale defrauding of the state’s public-assistance programs. That was about 10 months before investigative reports and a viral video drew focus to Minnesota’s massive problem with fraudsters. The scandal has been building for years.
Since 2022, federal prosecutors have charged nearly 100 suspects—mostly of Somali descent—in Minnesota fraud cases; officials estimate that fraud losses, now being probed as far back as 2018, could exceed $9 billion. President Donald Trump’s administration froze funding for some programs and mobilized investigations from multiple federal agencies, ranging from the Treasury Department to the IRS and the Justice Department.
Campbell, commissioner of Minnesota Management and Budget, told the lawmakers’ committee that her employees “work as hard as we can to support agencies” that are expected to follow the “systems of financial management” that her office creates.
Those systems involve “statutes, processes, policies, culture, agencies, practices, and [information technology] ... that have been developed over decades,” she said.
Thus, addressing fraud requires “layers” of coordinated changes, she said, such as analyzing data, upgrading technology, and changing state laws that govern program eligibility.
