Court denies nonprofit’s bid to rejoin fraud-addled food program
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
A Twin Cities nonprofit investigated alongside Feeding Our Future in a scheme to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers has lost its bid to resume participation in a federally-funded child nutrition program.
At a March hearing at the Minnesota Court of Appeals, an attorney for Partners in Quality Care argued that the Department of Education (MDE) illegally cut off PIQC from the Child and Adult Care Food Program and disqualified its leaders from future participation.
But this week, the court ruled that regulators at MDE gave PIQC a meaningful opportunity to correct problems and did not violate the group’s procedural due process rights.
MDE distributes federal funds from the USDA programs to participants in Minnesota. In 2024, Legislative Auditor Judy Randall issued a scathing report that found MDE’s “actions and inactions” opened the door to widespread fraud.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
Several of the defendants convicted of submitting fraudulent reimbursement claims for meal sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future also operated sites that PIQC had sponsored, but prosecutors have not filed charges against any PIQC employees or board members. Investigators noted in court filings that like Feeding Our Future, PIQC’s revenue grew dramatically during the pandemic because of fraud.
In 2024, jurors at a federal trial in Minneapolis found five people with ties to a Shakopee restaurant guilty of stealing $47 million from the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Summer Food Service Program. FBI forensic accountants determined that around $40 million of that flowed through PIQC, and prosecutors say the $40 million figure is in addition to the approximately $250 million allegedly stolen by the operators of several hundred Feeding Our Future-sponsored meal distribution sites.
In an email to MPR News on Wednesday, PIQC attorney Emily Asp writes that the nonprofit respects the judicial process but adds that MDE has been determined to cast blame for the fraud on PIQC while avoiding responsibility for its own oversight problems.
“The result is that, for now, eight PIQC individuals have been disqualified from future involvement in the CACFP despite none of these individuals nor PIQC ever having been indicted for any type of fraudulent conduct,” Asp writes. “Meanwhile, MDE has not been held accountable for its lack of oversight of taxpayer funds in one of the largest cases of fraud in U.S. history.”
At oral arguments in March, Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Joe Weiner argued that MDE was well within its authority to halt the payments to PIQC. Weiner added that the nonprofit’s managers should have known that managers of its sponsored meal sites were committing fraud when they claimed to have served food to more than two thirds of Minnesota’s 850,000 children.
