'We're looking into many programs:' U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson on fraud in Minnesota

Over the last two weeks, federal prosecutors in Minnesota have charged nine people with defrauding two different Medicaid programs, and they say this is just the beginning.

Last week, federal prosecutors charged a woman for defrauding a state autism treatment program out of $14 million.

The week prior, eight people were charged with defrauding the state's housing stabilization services. Now the state Department of Human Services is suspending another disability program over fraud allegations. No one has been charged.

This is all on top of more than six dozen people charged so far in the Feeding Our Future child nutrition scheme. Acting U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson is the prosecutor in charge of all these cases. He sat down with Minnesota Now host Nina Moini for a wide-ranging conversation about fraud in Minnesota.

The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Can you talk about how this happens?

These investigations generally have grown out of the Feeding Our Future case and investigation, where we've charged now 76 people for defrauding the federal child nutrition program during COVID. And that really was a COVID fraud scheme that took advantage of changes in the program that were implemented during COVID to make sure that kids were getting the meals they needed when they weren't in school.

That being said, these other programs, they are not COVID fraud schemes. These are traditional health care fraud schemes or government benefit fraud schemes that have nothing to do with COVID and have everything to do with problems in the way our programs are run here in the state of Minnesota.

Are you looking into the new fraud allegations in the Medicaid-funded program called Integrated Community Supports?

We're looking into many programs. The reality is — all these investigations during Feeding Our Future — we saw many of the defendants and individuals had other health care companies. Autism clinics, housing stabilization, the adult rehabilitation services (known as ARMHS), and ICS and these other ones.

You saw it in their bank records. And at some point, I asked the agents, “Could we run the numbers and look at what are the payments going out year-over-year from these autism programs at the state?” And I saw a very similar pattern to what we saw in Feeding Our Future was a program that started quite small and grew exponentially to over $200 million a year and going out the door just in Minnesota alone. And then you look at the providers and rank them from the ones that received the most to the smallest. And you look at the top and you see a lot of the common red flags, companies that were all created around the same time by people that had many different companies. They were single service providers.

Are there things specific to Minnesota that might make the problem worse here than other states?

Certainly we're traditionally a more generous state. Many of these programs are, or it's called, waivered Medicaid services. And so they're programs that are experimental in nature, that our state has decided to participate in. We don't have to, but we've chosen to as a state.

Many of them, we were the first, if not one of the first to implement in the nation. For example, the Housing Stabilization Services program. We were the first state in the nation to participate in it. And I think in some of our, you know, desire to make sure people are getting the treatment they need and the services they need, we've lost sight of program integrity concerns and making sure we have a real need there, and that our the services we're providing, or the program we're implementing is targeted to meet those needs.

How much money have taxpayers lost altogether between these different frauds and how much has been recovered?

It's in the billions of dollars.

In Feeding Our Future alone, we recovered more than $50 million. We're always looking to recover assets. We can seize bank accounts. We can seize property, real estate, cars, other money. We can't obviously, if you spend it on your day-to-day spending, even luxury spending, we often can't return that. And obviously, money that goes abroad, we generally can’t recover.

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted for lying to Congress after President Trump's urging. How would you respond if you were asked by your bosses at the Department of Justice to prosecute a Trump political adversary?

Well, that's never happened. We, like most U.S. Attorney's offices, we operate autonomously. We go where the evidence takes us, and we open our investigations as we see fit. And when the evidence suggests that we should, in consultation with law enforcement, without interference from anyone.