The thing which is beyond intellectually serious dispute is industrial-scaled fraud.
You keep wanting to make me "own" the CCAP's estimate. I will not reciprocally try to make you "own" $5 million, because I am charitable and because history has been unkind to the officials who made it.
I do ask you to own: "Minnesota HAS NOT suffered industrial-scale fraud across several social programs." Otherwise this is judging a high school debate competition, and I've had better.
The way I phrased that point was "The investigators allege repeatedly visiting daycare centers which did not, factually, have children physically present at the facility despite reimbursement paperwork identifying specific children being present at that specific time. The investigators demonstrated these lies on timestamped video, and perhaps in another life would have been YouTube stars."
<LLC voice>
We have reviewed your feedback on our editorial choices, and are comfortable that we have characterized the claims in the report accurately. We stand by "Minnesota has suffered a decade-long campaign of industrial-scale fraud against several social programs. This is beyond intellectually serious dispute." This is editorial analysis, informed—as is stated in the plain text—by the experience of several programs. Feeding our Future, for example, is cited in the piece, with analysis. It has resulted in dozens of convictions and guilty pleas, and federal prosecutors characterize it as having defrauded the public of nine figures.
You are welcome to your own opinion as to what could motivate a publication which routinely writes about fraud and finance to write about fraud and finance. Past issues you may enjoy include a year-long investigation into a single incident of fraud in NYC, a topological look at the fraud supply chain in credit cards, discussions of how the FTX fraud was uniquely enabled by their partner bank failing to properly configure their AML engine, and similar.
</LLC voice>
FoF claimed to supply meals at the same physical locations as CCAP and paid the same owners. As mentioned, one of nine of the operators profiled, who was previously raided in an investigation into alleged overbilling of CCAP, received $1.5M from FoF. FoF is in fact not a federal nutrition program but actually the name of a non-profit which received grants from a federal nutrition program for forwarding to third parties. CCAP is also funded by federal block funding.
The Swanson memo memorializes the consensus of his investigatory group and, put to question by OLA and legislators, they stick with that story:
Page 14 of PDF:
[The OLA] did not find evidence to substantiate Stillman’s allegation that there is $100 million in CCAP fraud annually. We did, on the other hand, find that the state’s CCAP fraud
investigators generally agree with Stillman’s opinions about the level of CCAP fraud, as well as why it is so pervasive.
(Stillman is a line level investigator who gave a media statement which was explosive. Swanson, who authored in the internal memo, was his manager.)
I do mention that other officials only agreed to characterize as fraud fraud which had resulted in convictions. We now, years later, have nine figures just from the convictions (and guilty pleas). These officials pointedly refuse to put any number on fraud other than the number incident to convictions.
Moreover: you should be very clearly correct if you accuse someone of citing a document as making claims it does not say. That is a serious accusation. BAM's citation of this piece is "the state’s own investigators believed that, over the past several years, greater than fifty percent of all reimbursements to daycare centers were fraudulent." This is _absolutely true_ and _is in the report as claimed_.
You could integrate Java applets into the DOM. Now you have two problems. (Keep in mind that back when this was popular IE 4 was busy kicking the pants off of Netscape Navigator. Fancy programming against IE 4?)
It was the core, defining feature of the most used language in the business world... and everyone with any sense is trying to forget it every happened.
Back on the first version of my site some years ago, I tested blue links versus my design's default (orange, if I recall correctly). Blue won by a mile.
Your mileage may vary. I've also had folks cite usability experts who suggest that changing navigation options is a Very Bad Thing. I do it when folks go to the purchasing page. It is a Very Bad Thing That Pays My Rent And Then Some.
You keep wanting to make me "own" the CCAP's estimate. I will not reciprocally try to make you "own" $5 million, because I am charitable and because history has been unkind to the officials who made it.
I do ask you to own: "Minnesota HAS NOT suffered industrial-scale fraud across several social programs." Otherwise this is judging a high school debate competition, and I've had better.