Labor Department Sends Strike Team to Investigate Minnesota Fraud

The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is conducting a review of Minnesota’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) program in the wake of the recently-discovered fraud ring targeting the state’s welfare system, with Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer saying she is “appalled” at the abuse.

Last month, City Journal’s Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo traced millions of dollars in Medicaid funding being defrauded from Minnesota taxpayers and going to the al-Qaeda-linked Somali terror group, Al-Shabaab.

Breitbart News has extensively covered the widespread fraud and corruption issue in the state’s Somali migrant community, including reports on 70 people being indicted in July for stealing over $250 million from hungry children during the COVID-19 pandemic and the DOL’s Small Business Administration (SBA) uncovering that several of the suspects also allegedly defrauded its Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). 

A coalition of nearly 500 Minnesota government employees accused Gov. Tim Walz (D) of ignoring their constant warnings about massive fraud by Somalis of the state’s aid programs, calling him “100% responsible” for the issue in a statement that went viral on social media. 

According to the state employees, “Tim Walz systematically retaliated against whistleblowers using monitoring, threats, repression, and did his best to discredit fraud reports.”

The DOL has been launching investigations into UI fraud around the country, having already returned a staggering $520 million in “suspected fraudulent” pandemic-era UI payments to the state of Maryland. 

In a letter sent to the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development on Monday, the DOL said it will conduct a targeted review onsite using a specialized UI strike team. 

“I am appalled at what we are hearing about potential fraud coming from numerous benefits programs in Minnesota. If there has been any related abuse of our UI systems, it will not be tolerated, and I trust our specialized strike team to get to the bottom of this and report their findings directly to me,” Chavez-DeRemer said in a statement. “Our mission to protect American workers remains unchanged, and I will not allow malicious actors to destroy the integrity of this trusted program.”

The secretary also spoke on the issue in a Monday interview on the Ruthless Podcast, calling out the lack of oversight from Congress of the UI funds. 

“That’s a fund that people count on. It was established for a very distinct reason… if somebody loses their job — it’s a bridge to get them to the next job,” she said. “That’s a pretty understandable thing to have… But under COVID, under the CARES Act, we saw all of those dollars being printed and pumped into the system — which, of course, we’ll talk about, probably inflation at some point — but that being said, it has now been an organized criminal activity… Nobody paid attention. The oversight wasn’t there from Congress.”

Going on to highlight the rampant fraud in Democrat-controlled states, she specifically named Minnesota and Oregon as examples and stated that the DOL has already returned a whopping $1.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury. 

“They asked for a lot of the waivers to continue these programs to offer more unemployment for a longer period of time,” Chavez-DeRemer said. “Now we’re seeing the fraudulent behavior, and we’ve recovered so many dollars… $1.4 billion we returned to the Treasury already… and that’s just from taking a little bit of a peek under the covers.”

“And now we saw the fraudulence come out of Minnesota,” she continued. “So today, we have sent a letter to the state to say we will send out one of our unemployment insurance strike teams to determine where else the fraudulent behavior [is] happening. Because the American people don’t deserve this.”

Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.