Take a look at the actual 2019 OLA report McKenzie cites. This characterization is wrong in ways that matter.

The "50% fraud" claim? It comes from one investigator (Swanson) using what the OLA explicitly calls "a higher level view, a view that does not require the kind of proof needed in a criminal or administrative proceeding." His methodology? If kids are poorly supervised, "running from room to room while adult employees spend hours in hallways chatting".... he counts the entire payment as fraud. That's not "billing for phantom children" it's "I don't like how this daycare is run."

The OLA's actual finding: "We did not find evidence to substantiate the allegation that the level of CCAP fraud in Minnesota is $100 million annually." Proven fraud over several years was $5-6 million.

Terrorism? "We were unable to substantiate the allegation that individuals in Minnesota sent CCAP fraud money to a foreign country where a terrorist organization obtained and used the money." They checked with the U.S. Attorney's Office.. none of Minnesota's terrorism cases involved CCAP money.

McKenzie writes "beyond intellectually serious dispute" about claims the primary source he cites explicitly could not substantiate.

Meanwhile the president is posting videos of the Obamas as apes and calling Somalis "garbage", having federal prosecutors throwing out arbitrary $9 billion estimates in press conferences.

See for yourself: https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf

Patrick is too polite to mention it, but frauds work much better if the fraudsters are also fully integrated into the political machine of the people nominally investigating the fraud.

On Shirely, and the reaction: there's a markedly different valence to a fraud 'investigation' seeking to arrest, try, convict, and imprison _fraudsters_ vs one seeking (through a thin veil) to mar an entire community and bring about their violent dispossession at the hands of unaccountable little green men. It would not be an unreasonable person that strongly supports the former and opposes the latter.

> They will sometimes organize recruitment very openly, using the same channels you use for recruiting at any other time: open Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and similar. They will film TikTok videos flashing their ill-gotten gains, and explaining steps in order for how you, too, can get paid.

> As a fraud investigator, you are allowed and encouraged to read Facebook at work.

I tend to believe this, but it would be a lot more compelling with links to a case where Facebook/TikTok posts were useful evidence.

Instead of giving parents vouchers, that they then use at a fraudulent daycare, in exchange for a fake job, while they take care of their children at home, parents should just get money, so that they can stay home taking care of their children if they prefer that.

All I remember hearing about this is how creepy and racist it was to look for kids at a black-owned daycare. It was a scam the whole time?

> Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

Leaving this to the conclusion does the piece a disservice. One can quibble (and it would be good to here) the extent to which the government isn't pursuing the sorts of fraud discussed, but this as a thesis makes clearer the argument throughout for earlier and more aggressive pursuit.

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.

> if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish,

I don't get this. What does the proportion of blue fish have to do with the total number of fish you catch?

Is there some stats knowledge I'm missing?

Yeah, the fraud’s been around for a while and the Biden DoJ was investigating it. One of the guys got fingered trying to bribe a juror¹ but he stole half the bribe money.

The politicization of the issue means that Democratic Party aligned people continually flag any reference to the scam on HN though. If anyone else said that someone broke in and stole all the records from a daycare days after it was accused of fraud it would be considered a bald-faced lie but because of the political alignment (this is VP candidate Walz’s state) everyone is forced to pretend there’s no scam.

¹ Paradoxically the one honest juror who reported the bribe was removed from the case. No others reported any bribe which obviously must mean they received none.

The reason that "the left" is rolling eyes at the fuss being made over this fraud is:

1. The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted. Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because

2. This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it go to takes to paint social programs as a money-pipe from good hardworking people to fraud and waste.

Great article, ties in neatly with observations among many that fraud, grifting, and devolution of the social contract has escalated greatly since 2020.

He was able to show all the evidence David had. The evidence had to be leaked out of the government of MN because it was silent whistleblowers that had been turned down after doing internal investigations. The government of MN may be complicit in all of this. It could be that they were trying to be anti-racist, which is why a lot of the fraud is specifically being performed by Somalians. But it can also be pay for vote fraud - where the leaders of the Somalian communities tell everyone who to vote for, and they are doing this because Walz (or some other people) are shielding the daycares from being shut down.

There is literally nothing wrong with stating this, we ought not be political about this. There may also be conservatives being elevated from Fraud as well, all of it should be routed.

At this point it definitely warrants deep investigations, not more articles trying to destroy a 23 year old that went viral.

Look, this is a mostly reasonable, if slightly vague, article about investigating fraud and mechanisms by which you do so.

What it lacks is any concrete suggestion as to what should change, beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.

The real problem here though is that the entire article ignores the duty[1] the government owes its citizens.

It's "fine"[2] if stripe or visa or whoever flips a coin and if it's tails they decide this person isn't allowed to be a customer of their company. The company loses any profit they might have made and life goes on.

It's considerably more problematic when the government refuses to serve a citizen (or even worse, levies an accusation).

There's some famous quotes about how many innocent people are appropriate to harm in the pursuit of the guilty but I'll leave those up to the reader.

[1] duty feels like too weak of a word here. Obligation? Requirement? The only reason the government even exists is to benefit the citizens.

[2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...

> To the extent that Bits about Money has an editorial line on that controversy, it is this: if you fish in a pond known to have 50% blue fish, and pull out nine fish, you will appear to be a savant-like catcher of blue fish, and people claiming that it is unlikely you have identified a blue fish will swiftly be made to look like fools. But the interesting bit of the observation is, almost entirely, the base rate of the pond. 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.

Does Patrick want to address the fact that this happened during school break and that Nick Shirley didn't prove much of anything?

Good example, though my impression was that was a quasi-viral TikTok trend that caught up random fools, not organized fraud?

This is a poor example though, because I don't think anyone got away with it? And it was viral, but not organized.

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.

> 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.

It's wild how distorted everyone's bubble is. If you go to conservative news sites or r/Conservative, you'd think this daycare business was the biggest problem that has ever faced the United States since 9/11. Every other article is about daycare and Somalis. Like, really? This is the big story of 2025???

In the real world, this maybe makes page 3 of the "crime" section of the newspaper for a single day.

Fair enough. But the reason that "the right" is not letting go of the story is:

1. The fraud was not in fact being investigated seriously enough until this kid, even while lacking the basics of journalism as Patrick describes here, forced the issue.

2. This is just another example of the decades long trend where more and more bad patterns and outcomes can persist for far too long because the normal checks are fended off with spurious accusations of racism.

There's some variation on how "the right" would handle (2). The center-right wants to shore up our culture of color-blindness to patch these vulnerabilities. The far-right wants to do away with egalitarianism altogether, and just go back to plain old racism. If we can't figure out the former, we might well end up with the latter.

(My reading is that Patrick falls squarely in the "center-right" here, fwiw. Then again, it can be hard to decode his exact subtext from under all the polite circumlocutions. Reading his stuff is something of an acquired skill and/or taste.)

> The fraud is in fact being investigated, people are being charged and convicted.

And as explained in TFA, this is inefficient and ineffective even in theory:

> 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.

> Despite this, rightwing media institutions are acting as if fraud is being ignored and maybe even covered up and encouraged because

Which is a reasonable characterization of the situation given the scale of the fraud and the fact that it's still going on, in such a blatant manner.

We're talking about total fraud on the order of $10b, and some significant fraction of that money has presumably been sent back to Somalia. We're talking here about amounts that would represent a significant percentage of Somalia's entire GDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somalia#Economy).

> This is just another example of the decades long project by those who have lots of money and don't want to see it go to takes to paint social programs as a money-pipe from good hardworking people to fraud and waste.

"The left" clearly has a vested interest in that not happening; therefore, it is also in their interest to take appropriate actions against fraud as they might learn about from the financial industry.

This article isn't vague at all. It references various sources, and uses precise language (if you can recognize it) to convey its message. Yes, innocent until proven guilty, but the fact that the government has "lesser" educated Fraud analysts, chooses to ask for reimbursement of overbilling, and many more nuanced topics talked about in the article is not vague.

> beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.

It suggests nothing of the sort, and in fact explicitly attempts to establish that none of this is intrinsic to any affinity group. The point isn't that the fraudsters in this case were of a particular ethnicity; it's that they shared an ethnicity, which enables the kind of internal social trust that fraud rings require.

Further, it suggests many clear heuristics that are nothing to do with ethnicity. The suggestions are clear and explicit; they just happen to involve occasionally denying services without proof of already-committed fraud, which you apparently consider unacceptable. But here is an experienced person telling you from expertise, with abundant citations and evidence, that nothing else really works, and furthermore that this is common knowledge in a well established industry specifically devoted to the problem.

I've called the phenomenon of private corporations refusing service the "Maoists in the Risk Department" in the past.

The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service. Fraudsters are fundamentally illegible to businesses of this size. And as the article stated, recidivism rates in fraud are high enough that someone caught doing fraud should never be given the time of day ever again. So the easiest strategy is to pick some heuristics that catch recidivist fraudsters and keep them a jealously guarded secret.

This calculus falls apart for the government. If someone rips the government off, they can arrest them, compel the production of documents from every third party they've interacted with, and throw them in jail where they won't be able to rip anyone else off for decades. Obviously, if we gave the Risk Department Maoists these same permissions, we'd be living under tyranny.

Well, more tyranny than we already live under.

But at the same time, the fact that we have these legal powers makes Risk Maoism largely obsolete. We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".

> [2] it becomes rapidly less fine when the company essentially has a monopoly over a system requires to participate in modern life, but that's a different topic...

That's the real thing here. Concentrated power is scary-- whether it's the federal government, Visa/Mastercard, Google, etc.

At least power concentrated under the control of a government might be held accountable to the people. With private, concentrated power: fat chance.

He literally writes about how the claims of racism and profiling were in bad faith, intended to frighten the state investigators, and that this is known from email communications revealed in discovery on some of these prosecutions where the fraud participants discuss the strategies they will employ to maximize the impact of their bad faith allegations of racism and racial profiling. There is no ambiguity here so I don’t understand why you still want to carry water for these fraudsters.