Comment by dispersed
6 hours ago
Under "In which we briefly return to Minnesota":
> And I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.
In... the same section where he cites all of the evidence the government has put together against the fraudsters. What is the issue? That these investigations should have been more prominently featured in the mainstream news? Would that have helped or hurt investigations?
> Of course, as the New York Times very carefully wordsmithed recently:
>> Minnesota officials said in early January that the state conducted compliance checks at nine child-care centers after Mr. Shirley posted his video and found them “operating as expected,” although it had “ongoing investigations” at four of them. One of the centers, which Mr. Shirley singled out because it misspelled the word “Learning” on its sign, has since voluntarily closed.
> An inattentive reader might conclude from this paragraph that the Times disputes Shirley’s reporting.
The New York Times is literally quoting what the Minnesota officials said. What were they supposed to do, add on "but a kid on YouTube says differently"?
I don't think the serious response to Nick Shirley's "journalism" is that there was no fraud; rather, it's that he came into the situation with a thinly veiled agenda and fed his audience exactly what they wanted to hear. Did his video make it more or less likely that we'll be able to investigate and resolve the fraud situation in MN? I guess that depends on how serious you think the laughably corrupt Trump administration is, but the fact that they seized on this as an excuse to send in 3000 ICE agents is not exactly promising.
The report to the government about a more than 50% fraud rate was from six years ago. The Minnesota government was not serious about dealing with problem. Most businesses would not last that long with a 50% customer fraud rate.
Yes, there were some investigations and convictions, but nothing to on a scale that would deal with problem, nor any systematic change to a level paying huge amounts of money to scammers.
He cites the 50% number from Jay Swanson, a CCAP Investigations Unit manager, and then dismisses criticism of the number by saying the criticism requires an unreasonable standard (only criminal convictions).
But if you read the cited source of how Swanson came up with that number he said it wasn't just for over-billing (claiming more kids than the places actually had).
Instead, by his estimation, the employees working are not actually working because 'children are unsupervised, running from room to room while adult “employees” spend hours in hallways chatting with other adults' and so all of the funds to those providers are fraudulent. [1]
I think it's pretty easy to criticize the logic for that 50% fraud rate number without requiring criminal convictions.
[1] https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf#page=16
This is a great argument. I wish this is what we were discussing rather than Nick Shirley and the partisan politics of the issue.
3 replies →
5 years ago. And it looks like the state was actually taking pretty aggressive moves against the fraud including ongoing investigations and legislation to shut down the fraud. [1]
There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video. That's taking the matter seriously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals
>There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video
Oh yeah, the prosecution was sooo active that all the daycares listed as operational and receiving funding, had no kids in them, had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment 3 angry men would come out shouting at you. How many legit daycares have you seen that look like that?
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The volume of prosecution that had occurred or was slated to occur was laughable compared to the amount of fraud known or reasonably believed to have occurred. When it is done at scale, prosecution is inefficient and much less effective than reforming processes so as to preempt fraud, which is not something that happened, as evidenced by the continuing fraud after the initial round of prosecution.
FTA:
> So-called “pay-and-chase”, where we put the burden on the government to disallow payments for violations retrospectively, has been enormously expensive and ineffective. Civil liability bounces off of exists-only-to-defraud LLC. Criminal prosecutions, among the most expensive kinds of intervention the government is capable of doing short of kinetic war, result in only a ~20% reduction in fraudulent behavior. Rearchitecting the process to require prior authorization resulted in an “immediate and permanent” 68% reduction. (I commend to you this research on Medicare fraud regarding dialysis transport. And yes, the team did some interesting work to distinguish fraudulent from legitimate usage of the program. Non-emergency transport for dialysis specifically had exploded in reimbursements—see Figure 1— not because American kidneys suddenly got worse but because fraudsters adversarially targeted an identified weakness in Medicare.)
To put it mildly I don't think there's a consensus among Minnesota DFL-types who paid attention to this that the state at any point took the matter seriously in proportion to its severity. There's a lot of evidence that they did the opposite thing. I try to avoid openly identifying my partisan commitments (see this whole thread for why) but: this shit is what we Democrats constantly dunk on the GOP for doing, and we're not acquitting ourselves well here.
It's annoying that we're talking about this in these terms, because the article is about public services fraud, and it's mostly technical, and it's an interesting subject. We shouldn't have to debate Tim Walz to engage with it.
First: assuming your goal is to stop the fraud, does making deliberately inflammatory YouTube videos get you closer to that goal? I think the government's response clearly shows that they're more interested in the optics of "blue state full of scammer immigrants" than any actual resolution.
Second: I think one of the points Patrick misses is that fraud did indisputably occur, but that doesn't mean we need to treat Shirley as a neutral observer who simply cares about fiscal responsibility. (If I'm wrong, I eagerly away his next video on red state fraud.)
He's not treating Shirley as a neutral observer; he's lamenting Shirley's involvement, which has impeded efforts to clean this up.
> What is the issue? That these investigations should have been more prominently featured in the mainstream news?
Important points throughout the article include: relatively little prosecution or enforcement occurred despite the awareness of rampant fraud; officials were naive to the common wisdom in fraud-prevention circles that people committing fraud in the past correlates strongly with the same individuals committing fraud in the future; "pay-and-chase" policies don't preempt funding flows to individuals suspected of fraud until it's established and feel the need to account for every fraudulent dollar instead of just blacklisting known bad actors the way that actual financial institutions do. FTA in particular, all emphasis FTA:
> For example, the primary evidence of a child attending a day-care was a handwritten sign-in sheet of minimal probative value. Prosecutors referred to them as “almost comical” and “useless.” They were routinely fraudulently filled out by a 17 year old “signing” for dozens of parents sequentially in the same handwriting, excepting cases where they were simply empty.
> To refute this “evidence”, the state forced itself to do weeks of stakeouts, producing hundreds of hours of video recording, after which it laboriously reconstructed exact counts of children seen entering/exiting a facility, compared it with the billing records, and then invoiced the centers only for proven overbilling.
> On general industry knowledge, if you are selected for examination in e.g. your credit card processing account, and your submission of evidence is “Oh yeah, those transactions are ones we customarily paperwork with a 17 year old committing obvious fraud”, your account will be swiftly closed. The financial institution doesn’t have to reach a conclusion about every dollar which has ever flowed through your account. What actual purpose would there be in shutting the barn door after the horse has left? The only interesting question is what you’ll be doing tomorrow, and clearly what you intend to do tomorrow is fraud.
Moving on,
> I don't think the serious response to Nick Shirley's "journalism" is that there was no fraud; rather, it's that he came into the situation with a thinly veiled agenda and fed his audience exactly what they wanted to hear.
My take is that there's no good reason to suspect that, except for holding an opposed thinly veiled agenda. And there is no serious dispute of the fact that billions of dollars of fraud occurred.
> Did his video make it more or less likely that we'll be able to investigate and resolve the fraud situation in MN?
It clearly made it more likely, as demonstrated by federal senate hearings that have extensively referenced the video (I've seen a segment where a senator literally had a prop photo of the "Quality Learing Center").
> the fact that they seized on this as an excuse to send in 3000 ICE agents is not exactly promising.
Your premise is that a YouTube video published Dec 26, 2025 somehow motivated a federal law enforcement action that commenced on Dec 4, 2025. Also, this claim conflates ICE with CBP. Also, per Wikipedia, out of thousands of arrests, only 23 have been of Somalis; and it's been abundantly clear in all the press functions that the targets have overwhelmingly been Hispanic — because they're overwhelmingly represented among illegal immigrants in the US, including in MN.
> Your premise is that a YouTube video published Dec 26, 2025 somehow motivated a federal law enforcement action that commenced on Dec 4, 2025.
The surge of ~2,000 officers only happened around Jan 5-6, 2026. And this happened after the video in question was reposted by J.D. Vance and referenced by Kash Patel.
It's true that Operation Metro Surge as a whole started a month earlier. But, zooming out from that specific video, the operation was from the start motivated by the fraud scandal, according to reliable sources [1]. Official statements around this time of the later surge also referenced the fraud scandal [2]. Meanwhile, Trump delivered several speeches during this time complaining in racist terms about Somalis in general.
It's also true that the actual activity of Operation Metro Surge is mostly unrelated to the fraud. But that's the whole point! The administration seized on the fraud, and later seized on that specific video, as an excuse to send in ICE and CBP agents to do something completely different. As the parent said, this probably did not "make it more [..] likely that we'll be able to investigate and resolve the fraud situation in MN". Or if it did, it did so very inefficiently compared to other possible approaches such as getting the FBI to focus on it (which also happened). The surge did focus public attention on the issue, which might encourage local officials to resolve it. But it also massively poisoned the well. How much you want to talk about the fraud issue is now a proxy for how much you _don't_ want to talk about what liberals see as the much larger issue of abuses by ICE/CBP.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/ice-somali-mi...
[2] https://x.com/KristiNoem/status/2005687345895645204