The Minnesota investigations started under the Biden administration.
Sarah Kliff and Ernesto Londoño at NYT:
Sarah Kliff and Ernesto Londoño at NYT:
The Justice Department plans to announce criminal charges on Thursday against 15 people for attempting to defraud Minnesota Medicaid and other social service programs in the state of more than $90 million, according to documents prepared to be filed in court and obtained by The New York Times.
Among the defendants are an owner and an employee of autism clinics, who are charged with submitting $46.6 million in fraudulent claims to Medicaid, the public health plan that covers low-income people. Additional defendants will be charged with filing bogus claims to Medicaid for other services, including those that assist disabled people with obtaining housing and living independently.
President Trump focused attention on fraud in Minnesota after news reports and a social media video from a conservative content creator last year. Administration officials cited fraud among the reasons for sending hundreds of federal agents to Minnesota to crack down on illegal immigration.
That operation set off fierce protests and led to the killings of two American citizens early this year. It also prompted the resignation of several experienced fraud prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota, hobbling investigations that had been underway for months.
In March, the White House started a broad initiative to combat fraud nationwide, an effort being led by Vice President JD Vance. Last week, Mr. Vance announced plans for the federal government to withhold $1.3 billion in federal payments to California because, he said, the state had failed to combat Medicaid fraud.
Fraud in Minnesota’s generous social safety net programs has been a concern for years. In 2022, it became a major scandal after federal prosecutors charged dozens of people accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a Covid-era program created to feed low-income children.
Since then, state and federal officials have uncovered significant fraud in several other programs run by state agencies. To date, the vast majority of people charged with wrongdoing are of Somali ancestry, a fact that Mr. Trump has noted with derision.
The new Justice Department charges focus on two autism clinics, Smart Therapy in Minneapolis and Star Autism in St. Cloud, Minn. The court documents describe one defendant, Shamso Ahmed Hassan, as having an ownership stake in both companies. It says that the other, Hanaan Mursal Yusuf, was an employee of Smart Therapy.
The charges describe a scheme where the two defendants along with unnamed co-conspirators “paid illegal cash kickbacks of approximately $300 to $1,500 per child” to families that enrolled their children in autism therapy services. The companies then billed Medicaid millions to treat those children for autism, according to the prosecutors’ charges.
