'Incompetence or dereliction': Minnesota lawmaker rips Tim Walz as state fraud losses mount

The House Oversight Committee is ramping up its probe into Minnesota Gov Tim Walz as Republican lawmakers say the scale of the state s exploding fraud schemes draw questions about whether top authorities should have been able to detect and stop them ahead of time To Rep Pete Stauber R-Minn the fraud schemes coming from his state are so numerous and so costly that he believes they represent either incompetence or dereliction of duty Well with the magnitude of the fraud I find it really almost impossible that the governor or his staff and the attorney general didn't know Stauber mentioned And the Minnesota taxpayers are paying for it DAVID MARCUS WHITE GUILT APATHY FUEL MASSIVE CORRUPTION IN MINNESOTAOversight Chairman James Comer R-Ky informed Fox News Digital he had a high level of confidence that the committee would find out whether the governor s office should have been aware of the mountain of fraud and whether the state s climbing losses could have been prevented citing whistleblowers' testimony he hopes to confirm We want to know how much fraud Is it still ongoing Were people aware and turned a blind eye That s pretty much the purpose of our review Comer mentioned on Friday The House Oversight Committee launched its examination earlier this month after new reports revealed that the state had been hemorrhaging funds through fraud schemes in its social benefit programs The the greater part prominent example the Feeding Our Future scheme resulted in a million loss when fraudsters received payments from the state for services that went unfulfilled according to the Department of Justice DOJ But the documented problems stretch well beyond the one example Notably the state had to shutter its housing assistance operation after housing providers were discontinued due to credible assertions of fraud uncovered by the FBI in Similarly the state s Medicaid costs covering autism-related services have grown exponentially According to the Minnesota Reformer payments for the state s autism plan went from million to over million since Stauber explained the widespread fraud had climbed into the billions It remains unclear however how much money the state has lost to fraud in contemporary years Although the schemes all look slightly different Comer disclosed they have one underlying question Was Walz aware It s going to be a pretty comprehensive study Comer mentioned of efforts to answer that question We ve gotten off to a pretty good start because we have various whistleblowers Comer declared the whistleblowers narrated the committee that members inside the governor s office had been made aware of the fraud but that it had largely gone unheeded They're alleging that they made the governor and the attorney general aware a long time ago and they did nothing about it And it s been an ongoing trouble OMAR ACCUSED BY GOP OPPONENT OF OPENING UP THE DOOR TO MASSIVE MINNEAPOLIS FRAUD 'DEEP DEEP TIES'He disclosed the committee would send investigators to Minnesota in the near future but didn't give a timeline for how long he expected the examination to take Comer also declined to say exactly how numerous whistleblowers had spoken with the committee so far Multiple Comer reported When petitioned about the committee s review and whether Walz s office would comply with committee requests the governor s office noted yes We look forward to working together While the governor has been working to ensure fraudsters go to prison the president has been letting them out Walz s office stated