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The $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ free food fraud in which Somali groups stole a quarter of a billion dollars while claiming to feed hundreds of thousands of children who never existed seemed like the biggest case of welfare fraud in Minnesota, but it may be just the beginning.
Somali autism fraud, partly linked to the ‘Feeding Our Future’ scam, may be even bigger and after the FBI raids of autism clinics last December, the scale of it is still being put together.
The pattern in both Somali meals for children and autism treatment for children is similar.
In 2019, Feeding Our Future distributed $3.4 million in taxpayer food aid funds to the non-profits it was sponsoring, In 2020, that shot up to $42 million and then up to $197 million in 2021.
EIDBI autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota similarly shot up from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million in 2021, $279 million in 2022, $399 million in 2023, and nearing $400 million most of the way through 2024 for a total of over $1.4 billion.
How did autism claims rise from $3 million to $400 million a year in just 4 years?
The number of autism providers shot up 700% from 41 to 328 over 5 years. 1 in 16 Somali four-year-olds (6%) were supposedly suffering from autism leading to a mass demand for services. Somalis had accused the Minnesota Department of Human Services of racism, and protested outside its offices to pressure it into providing funding for the $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ and similarly launched a pressure campaign to sign off on the autism fraud.
Somali community groups set up their own autism treatment centers to provide diverse “culturally appropriate programming” and Somali kids were seven times more likely to receive autism treatment than other children. Whistleblowers at the Minnesota Department of Human Services report that 1 in 5 autism centers in the state are now under investigation.
In the 85 investigations, of the 5 closed cases last year, all of them involved Somalis including apparently Sharmarke Issa, the former chair of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority who pleaded guilty over his involvement in the Feeding Our Future fraud.
Some of the autism clinics double dipped by also signing up to hand out meals to children. Smart Therapy, one of the autism clinics raided by the FBI, received $13 million from Medicaid and also signed up with Feeding Our Future to get ‘reimbursements’ from the government for allegedly feeding 300 kids a day for seven days a week which by 2021 was up to 500 kids.
The emails listed in the federal complaint appeared to be signed by Aisha Hassan, the CEO and President of Smart Therapy. The autism center was allegedly working with S&S Catering, whose owner Qamar Ahmed Hassan, took in $13 million in government money and then wrote checks to a travel agency specializing in Islamic tours of Mecca as part of the Feeding Our Future fraud. It’s unknown if Qamar Hassan and Asha Hassan are related, but a whistleblower told investigators that another Smart Therapy owner was indeed related to Qamar Hassan.
A Smart Therapy whistleblower stated that the employees were teenage family members of the owners with no training, spent all day on their phones, that the children were not autistic, and that their parents were paid to sign them up for ‘treatment’ with envelopes full of cash.
Star Autism Center, also raided by the FBI, billed Medicaid for 21.5 hours of autism therapy from one therapist in one day. Another billed 23 hours of services in a single day. Star’s organizer, Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, claimed to know nothing. Both centers billed for treatments being provided by its ‘therapists’ while they were in Kenya (which hosts a large Somali migrant population) and Turkey which serves as a center for Islamic terrorist migration. Including ISIS.
It is difficult to know the full scale of the Somali autism fraud, but troublingly DHS Assistant Commissioner Natasha Merz had claimed that the catastrophic growth of the state’s autism program has been “pretty consistent” with other DHS programs including housing and disability funding. That means that the fraud we know could be only the tip of a massive iceberg.
For example, Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) was budgeted at $2.6 million when it was launched in 2020 but by 2024, was expected to hit $120 million. The sheer scale of welfare fraud under the Walz administration is so severe that hundreds of millions of dollars can easily vanish across the board without anyone even noticing because it’s no longer an aberration.
Under Gov. Tim Walz, it’s become routine for welfare programs to shoot up from the millions to the hundreds of millions. “Well, I think you’re always accountable for when things happen, but I think the accountability piece that we’re going to have to try and understand,” Walz replied, when asked about Minnesota’s spiraling welfare fraud crisis. “The question is, in state government, our job is to carry out the programs to try and get the resources to the people who need them.”
While Gov. Walz may act baffled, he and his political allies in the DFL chose to roll money out the door to Somali groups, while eliminating accountability and avoiding any scrutiny out of fear of racism. Between Attorney General Keith X. Ellison and DHS Inspector General Kulani Moti, a former public defender and the daughter of the first ‘Oromo’ immigrant from East Africa to move to Minnesota, sensitivity has been a priority, rigorous enforcement has not.
Somalis were already caught stealing tens of millions of dollars in various unrelated Medicaid health care frauds including $20 million in fraud in 2023 alone. This year there’s already been a Somali $7 million fraud conviction. But without federal investigations, these are just a fraction of the abuses being caught at the state level, even as the massive systematic fraud goes on.
Somali fraud now appears to equal half the budgets for the Twin Cities. How big can the fraud get before Minnesota runs out of money?