A Republican candidate for the Minnesota Senate says the state's new fraud prevention law would have caught past schemes only after taxpayer money was already gone. Heidi Heino, who is running in the 36th Senate District, tested the Office of the Inspector General law against the state's previous fraud scandals and concluded that it lacks safeguards to act when warning signs first appear.
The law, signed by Gov. Tim Walz, creates an independent statewide watchdog that oversees inspectors general, investigates alleged fraud across state programs, establishes fraud prevention standards, and improves coordination and data sharing. Heino told Fox News Digital that when she stress tested it against the Feeding Our Future scheme and other Minnesota fraud cases, the law would have found the fraud eventually. "It would have found the fraud eventually, but it's way after the money was already gone and we would still be stuck trying to claw it back," she said.
The law was passed as Minnesota confronts the fallout from large fraud schemes involving childcare, autism, housing and disability services. Republicans have blamed leadership and oversight failures, and the Trump administration has launched a federal anti-fraud task force led by Vice President JD Vance. Feeding Our Future allegedly stole $250 million from a federally funded child nutrition program during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Heino, who works as a corporate leader whose day job involves underwriting, said she applied similar review and auditing practices to identify where Minnesota's safeguards fall short. She pointed to a 2,800% increase in payments to Feeding Our Future between 2020 and 2021 as a jump that should have automatically triggered alarms and further review. "You don't have to be a detective to see that there's some issue there and so to investigate that and check and see if those claims are legitimate, and if they were legitimate, have someone actually sign off on it," she said.
Heino also criticized the fact that Feeding Our Future was able to address complaints against itself. She said there were 30 complaints to the Minnesota Department of Education regarding the fraud, which were mostly overlooked, and that the organization had to correct itself, which she described as a significant gap. She proposed immediately freezing payments, conducting a full review, and triggering an outside audit. "The OIG has good bones, but it needs teeth," she said.
Heino argued that independent audits would cost less than the losses they prevent. "We get a lot of pushback saying this is going to be expensive, but is it?" she said. "It will be less expensive to have an independent audit than it is going to be to have all the fraud and lose taxpayer dollars to fraudulent activities."
She extended the same concerns to Minnesota's Paid Leave program, arguing that the state should investigate more before sending out checks. "They pay out before they have the doctor's note certifying that this is actually true and they have verified it," she said. Heino described the new law as a "great first step" but said it does not go far enough to protect taxpayers and prevent future fraud.
Fox News Digital reached out to Walz's office and the Minnesota Department of Education for comment. In August, Bill Glahn, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, told Fox News Digital that the fraud situation in the state had not been properly addressed and that "there is no sense in which the fraud has been stopped in Minnesota."