“Today we are building on the work of the last several years and strengthening Minnesota’s defenses against fraud,” the state’s governor, Tim Walz, said yesterday. “If you commit fraud in Minnesota, you will be caught and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
This is mostly spin, of course. There is not much “building” on recent work happening in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. It is more like the opposite. The “recent work” was done far from the Walz orbit, work in the Archdiocese of St. Paul by the FBI — not anything to do with Somali-immigrant fraud networks recently revealed through no merit of Tim Walz or his administration.
Which is why Walz must now appear to lead the dance. The Epoch Times reports that Walz has appointed as “the state’s director of program integrity” — you might call it his “Fraud Czar” — one Tim O’Malley, the FBI agent who had worked on the Archdiocese fraud.
But maybe the cleverest part is his name. A Tim appointed a Tim.
Walz also makes much of a new “partnership with WayPoint Inc., a Minnesota firm made up of former law enforcement and federal agents focused on forensic accounting and investigations. They will develop a comprehensive fraud-prevention strategy for the state.”
Or so it is spun.
Paul Jacob wrote about the underlying fraud scandal on December First, in “Red-Flagged Welfare Fraud.”