Minnesota’s Somali community has been caught funneling taxpayer dollars to terrorist.

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There is clearly some fraud but there is nothing to support the claim that money is being funneled to terrorists. The increase is largely due to change in policy and Autism now being covered. There is clearly some fraud but there is nothing to support the claim that money is being funneled to terrorists.

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A woman who works for an insurance company that administers Medical Assistance — granted anonymity because she’s not authorized by her company to speak to the media — said there’s widespread concern that the autism program is riddled with fraud.

“We all talk about it,” she said.

Unlike the nonexistent meals that were the vehicle for the Feeding Our Future fraud, she said children are actually going to the autism centers, but, “A lot of them we feel are just daycare centers,” she said. “I think that people that own the daycare are saying they’re autistic when they’re not.”

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The families are predominantly immigrants who are fairly new to Medical Assistance, the insurance worker said, with autism center employees often calling on behalf of parents due to a lack of English language proficiency.

Larsson said children of immigrants who can’t speak English fluently are getting diagnosed, leaving the parents to deal with a befuddling bureaucracy.

“You talk to parents who don’t have any idea why they’re sending the kid to an autism center,” he said.

Some bad operators could be taking advantage of that language gap, he said.

“It wouldn’t shock me if there are confused families … that aren’t committing fraud, they’re just trying to get services … and they need the daycare,” Larsson said. “??Maybe there’s providers just playing it fast with that whole concept.”

He said some parents call his company looking for a provider and say they called numerous others where nobody ever answered the phone.

“So are some of these fake centers?” Larsson said.

Larsson serves on a national certification board that responded to widespread allegations of fraud in Florida in 2018 by setting up a special unit to process the complaints. The state found therapy providers billing for more than 24 hours in a day, billing for 31 consecutive days, and falsifying qualifications.

“It’s easy to imagine something like that’s going on here” — especially without the safeguard of rigorous licensing, Larsson said. “What would stop someone from renting out an apartment … and saying ‘This is my autism treatment center?’ As much bureaucracy as there is that we contend with, there’s nothing that would stop us from doing that.”

Florida operators were required to have 40 hours of training to get started, but people were falsifying training records, Larsson said.

After spending 20 years trying to get a Minnesota autism program in place, Larsson used to think Minnesota had too many bureaucratic hurdles. Now he’s not so sure.

“My eyes have been opening more and more,” he said.

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The article you linked definitely does not show a direct connection to terrorism, but I wouldn't say it paints a completely different picture. There is obviously fraud going on, based on that article, and a lot of it is due to immigrants.

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Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”

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