[danielvf]

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.

[Brybry]

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

[tptacek]

This is a great argument. I wish this is what we were discussing rather than Nick Shirley and the partisan politics of the issue.

[cogman10]

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

[joe_mamba]

>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?

[tptacek]

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.

[zahlman]

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.)

[dispersed]

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.)

[tptacek]

He's not treating Shirley as a neutral observer; he's lamenting Shirley's involvement, which has impeded efforts to clean this up.