Minnesota’s fraud scandal was ‘shockingly easy’ to pull off, is likely worse than reported: Ex prosecutor
Minneapolis has been at the center of national headlines in recent weeks over a massive fraud scandal that experts say will cost taxpayers over a billion dollars. Fox News Digital...
By Fox News · Fox News
Minneapolis has been at the center of national headlines in recent weeks over a massive fraud scandal that experts say will cost taxpayers over a billion dollars. Fox News Digital spoke to a former prosecutor who worked on one of the central cases in the controversy. Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab, who served nearly four years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and briefly worked on the Feeding Our Future case, says the public still doesn’t grasp the scale, speed and simplicity of the fraud that unfolded, or how deeply government failures contributed to it. "I think you generally have a sense that your government is gonna be fighting for you and spending your money just generally OK, and that was absolutely not the case," Teirab told Fox News Digital. "The amount of fraud was rampant, it was staggering, and happened really, really quickly. Just over the course of a couple years, the amount of fraud that happened in Minnesota is maybe in excess or probably in excess of a billion dollars, and one of the main prosecutors in a lot of the fraud, the former acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, said the number was likely over $2 billion. So that is what we're dealing with. It's a travesty that our hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being wasted away." MN FRAUDSTERS BLEW TAXPAYER CASH ON LUXURIES OUT OF REACH FOR MOST AMERICANS, FEDS SAY The scheme that has garnered most of the national attention involved the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which misappropriated $250 million in COVID-19 funds. But the fraud within various government agencies in Minnesota goes far deeper, Teirab explained. He asserted that the system was set up in a way that made it possible, and relatively simple, for various nonprofits to scam the government out of over $2 billion when it’s all said and done. "When I was on the Feeding Our Future case, the big thing that jumped out to me was, honestly, how easy this fraud was to do," Teirab told Fox News Digital. "I mean, these fraudsters were j…