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Gov. Tim Walz's recent announcement that he create a new unit to investigate theft of public funds from state and federally funded programs (front page, Jan. 4) raises the question: Don't we already have state fraud investigators? The answer is: Yes, we have plenty.

The Minnesota Attorney General's Office (AG), the Minnesota Department of Commerce (DC), the Minnesota Inspector General's Office (IG), the Minnesota Department of Revenue (DR) and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) are some of the primary state agencies that investigate theft of public funds. When an organization steals educational funds, the IG, the investigative agency for the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) and the BCA get involved. When there is tax fraud, the DR investigates. When a commercial business scams consumers, the DC steps in. We have a wealth of investigators — we just need to use them better than we have.

One example of poor government leadership in using our existing vast investigative resources is obviously the ongoing Feeding our Future (FOF) federal fraud prosecution, which involves over $250 million of stolen public funds. The MDE identified fraud issues with FOF as early as April 2020 and filed a civil lawsuit against FOF seven months later. The AG represented the MDE in the lawsuit yet never reported suspicions of fraud to the FBI; the MDE did nearly a year later in February 2021. In fact, the AG's office did not launch its own investigation of FOF until February 2022, a full year after that. Luckily, the federal government stepped in, indicted numerous individuals with serious fraud crimes, and so far, has secured approximately 23 federal convictions.

Importantly, this inexcusable delay in getting to the bottom of this was not a lack of investigators, a lack of a "central" agency to investigate, agencies entrenched in behaviors that inhibit cooperation, or even political gridlock that can result from a governor and attorney general being from different political parties. None of this was, or is, the problem.

History now repeats itself with the recent investigation of the autism treatment centers Star Autism and Smart Therapy. Once again, the federal government must fill the void of criminal investigations left by our state's leaders. Federal authorities jumped in by executing search warrants at the treatment centers a few weeks ago (front page, Dec. 13). These treatment centers were allegedly stealing state and federal Medicaid funds. Again, one must ask: Where were our state investigators? These cases also allegedly involve significant theft of state funds, yet we haven't heard a peep from the AG's office or any other state agency.

Now Walz will form, by executive order (he must anticipate some opposition to this), yet another state office and wants $39M of public money to get it started, saying this is needed to investigate fraud cases like the autism centers investigation. He said this new unit will be housed in the BCA and investigators from DC will be transferred to it. The BCA and DC already have investigators who cooperate with other state agencies in fraud investigations, so this new unit sounds more like shuffling people and papers rather than fighting fraud.

Gov. Walz is obviously upset about the autism centers fraud matter. Recall, as this paper reported on Dec. 13, that he said that "this pisses me off unlike anything else." That's fine, but the governor's new positions and actions suggest something that isn't true: that the fraud occurs because there are insufficient resources to investigate it. The issue isn't the lack of resources, it's the lack of will and, as the legislative auditor found in 2024, a persistent turning of a blind eye by the leaders of the agencies and administration.

There is every reason to believe that the existing investigative agencies in state government are qualified and prepared to conduct these investigations so long as the fraud is reported and the agencies which hand out the money cooperate in the investigations. Rather than literally throwing $39 million of good money after bad, let's let them do their jobs and investigate.

Joseph Tamburino, Minneapolis, is an attorney.