A former Minnesota state trooper and criminal investigator told lawmakers this week that senior officials at the state's Department of Human Services tried to force him to delete portions of a fraud report, then launched a campaign of harassment against his entire unit when investigators refused to back down.

Jay Swanson, who spent 40 years in state government and worked as an investigator in the Office of Inspector General for Minnesota's DHS, described in sworn testimony a pattern of obstruction that he said crippled fraud investigations during the early stages of what he now calls "a somewhat loosely organized criminal enterprise beginning to pillage Minnesota's public benefits system."

The testimony lands at a moment when federal authorities are actively raiding child care facilities across the Minneapolis area. Newsmax reported that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security recently executed search warrants at more than 20 Minneapolis-area child care centers and related businesses as part of an ongoing fraud investigation. The question Swanson's testimony forces into the open is a simple one: How much of this could have been stopped years ago if the people running Minnesota's DHS hadn't gotten in the way?

The scam that started in a refugee camp

Swanson told lawmakers he regularly joined investigators and agents interviewing owners and employees of child care centers under scrutiny. What they heard was striking.

"More than once, I heard an owner or employee respond when we asked where they first learned about the daycare scam. They would say they had first heard about it while in the refugee camp in Kenya."

Those individuals, Swanson testified, told investigators that the fraud scheme could be run in multiple states, but Minnesota was the easiest target and offered the most money. That detail, confirmed in reporting by the New York Post, paints a picture of a state that had effectively become a magnet for organized benefits fraud.

The investigation bore early results. DHS investigators and Bureau of Criminal Apprehension agents opened a probe into a child care center and found extensive billing fraud. Federal agents from the FBI, the IRS Criminal Investigation Unit, and the U.S. Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General were brought in.

That joint effort led to a 2017 federal indictment of the owner of Salama Child Care Center, located at 1411 Nicola Avenue in Minneapolis. The owner eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced in 2018 to two years in prison and ordered to pay restitution of more than $1.4 million.

Swanson noted that the same address later appeared in a YouTube video from last December showing a facility called the "Quality Learing Center", the misspelling apparently included on the signage, operating at the very same location. That site is among those now sitting abandoned after FBI raids swept through the area.

A senior official, red-faced and almost yelling

By mid-2018, the fraud cases had drawn enough attention that the Minnesota legislature directed the Office of the Legislative Auditor to conduct a special review of the Child Care Assistance Program. That should have been a straightforward process. It wasn't.

Swanson testified that in August 2018, as he prepared answers to questions the OLA had sent him by email, a DHS official intervened. The official told Swanson to route his responses through DHS instead of sending them directly to the auditor's office.

When Swanson forwarded his answers about fraud trends in the CCAP as directed, the response was immediate and hostile:

"I soon had a senior DHS official in my office, angry, red-faced, and almost yelling. The senior DHS official told me to delete a number of paragraphs of the document that I had sent."

Swanson stated plainly that Minnesota law requires state employees to cooperate with the OLA and turn over information as requested. Fox News reported that Swanson told the committee he warned the official that what they were asking him to do was illegal.

A few days later, the same official found Swanson again. The message this time, in Swanson's telling, was blunt:

"I just came from the commissioner's office, and they're sending your document to the OLA. You better be ready for the blank storm that's coming your way."

The "blank storm", Swanson's cleaned-up version of what was apparently a profane warning, arrived on schedule.

Harassment, a $90,000 consultant, and six lost months

What followed, in Swanson's account, was a systematic effort to discredit and disrupt his unit. He described it in three stages.

First, DHS paid $90,000 to an outside consultant, one Swanson said had no experience in public benefit program integrity or financial fraud investigations, to label the CCAP fraud allegations in his email as "unreliable and unable to be proven." During a heated interview with the consultants, Swanson pushed back hard:

"I told them that I really didn't care what they put in their report, but if they said there was no fraud or that our investigators were making this up, that when this became public, their company would lose all credibility. I told them that the fraud was so huge that sooner or later it would come to light."

Second, DHS officials placed false derogatory information on a supervisor's performance review. Third, DHS launched what it called a "continuous improvement program" targeting the fraud investigation unit.

The program began, Swanson said, with a senior continuous improvement official berating the group for roughly 30 minutes, telling them "in essence we were incompetent and terrible employees." A DHS assistant commissioner sat in the room and watched.

Swanson said he had never seen anything like it in four decades of state government work.

Over the next six months, the unit was pulled into endless group meetings and assigned homework between sessions, all led by the same official who had berated them at the start. The result was predictable. Investigators and supervisors were "unable to conduct hardly any investigative activity" during that stretch, Swanson testified.

The math is grim. Six months of a fraud investigation unit sidelined by its own agency, while a criminal enterprise continued to drain public funds. That isn't bureaucratic incompetence. That is a choice, made by officials whose names Swanson did not publicly identify but whose actions he described in detail.

A pattern that reaches beyond DHS

Republican lawmakers have pointed to what happened after Tim Walz took office as governor. The New York Post reported that GOP legislators said the DHS Office of Inspector General's criminal investigative powers were shut down under Walz, stripping the unit of its ability to conduct surveillance, execute warrants, seize evidence, and coordinate with state investigators. Fox News reported that Swanson alleged some of the senior DHS officials involved in the harassment still work at the agency.

The political fallout continues to build. Minnesota Democrats have closed ranks to block an impeachment inquiry into Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison over the broader fraud scandal, raising questions about whether accountability will ever reach the officials who oversaw the system.

Minnesota is not the only state grappling with large-scale fraud in public benefit programs. Federal investigators have been probing similar schemes in California, where oversight failures have allowed billions in suspected fraud to go unchecked.

What the testimony leaves unanswered

Swanson's account is detailed, but it raises as many questions as it answers. He did not name the specific DHS officials who allegedly ordered him to delete findings, berated his team, or planted false information on a supervisor's review. The $90,000 consultant has not been publicly identified. The exact contents of the paragraphs Swanson was told to delete remain unknown.

Nor is it clear from the testimony what specific proceeding or committee Swanson appeared before. The venue and exact date were not disclosed in available reporting.

What is clear is the timeline. Investigators flagged organized fraud. They built cases. They won a federal conviction. And when the legislature's auditor came asking questions, senior officials at the very agency responsible for the program tried to control, and, in Swanson's telling, suppress, the answers.

The state's response to governance failures extends beyond fraud. Minnesota has also faced scrutiny over election integrity lapses, adding to a broader picture of institutional accountability gaps under state leadership.

Swanson's closing reflection in his testimony carried the weight of a man who watched a system fail from the inside:

"As I look back with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, I realize that what our team saw was the early stages of a somewhat loosely organized criminal enterprise beginning to pillage Minnesota's public benefits system."

He saw it. His team saw it. They said so, in writing. And the people above them tried to make the writing disappear. When that didn't work, they tried to make the investigators disappear instead, not by firing them, but by burying them in meetings and homework until the fraud could keep running undisturbed.

The fraud did come to light, just as Swanson warned. The only question left is whether the officials who tried to keep it in the dark will ever face consequences of their own.