Enough already, stop the fraud!!!
Fighting fraud in state government is popular with voters, so why isn’t it happening?
Here in the office, we just got the results of our quarterly Thinking Minnesota opinion poll. As always, we surveyed 500 registered voters representing a cross-section of the state.
Given new developments in the Feeding Our Future case, and the ever-growing dollar amount in our ScandalTracker 2025TM spreadsheet, we added some additional questions on the subject.
Last month, the state senate passed a bill (SF 856) to create a state-government-wide Office of Inspector General (OIG), with extra powers to fight fraud perpetrated against state government programs. The bill passed on an overwhelming and bipartisan 60-7 vote.
It was promptly declared dead on arrival by the Democratic leader in the evenly divided (67-67) state House of Representatives. Too costly, we’re told, with the program’s $11 million budget representing a back-breaking 0.016 percent of the total state budget.
Voters may disagree. Our polling shows a 72 percent share in favor of the idea, with only 24 percent opposed.
I had an original idea that we polled. State agencies are reluctant to fight fraud for many reasons, one of which is, if successful, it would reduce the agency’s budget. So, we polled an idea of a gain-sharing program for agencies to keep a portion of the fraud recoveries. Voters supported the idea 67-29.
We also polled several other questions related to waste, fraud, and nonprofits, which we will soon share.