Minnesota’s fraud scandal was ‘shockingly easy’ to pull off, is likely worse than reported: ex prosecutor
Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab worked on the Feeding Our Future fraud case
By Andrew Mark Miller Fox News
Published December 11, 2025 11:00am EST
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Minneapolis has been at the center of national headlines in recent weeks over a massive fraud scandal that experts say will cost taxpayers over a billion dollars. Fox News Digital spoke to a former prosecutor who worked on one of the central cases in the controversy.
Former federal prosecutor Joe Teirab, who served nearly four years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis and briefly worked on the Feeding Our Future case, says the public still doesn’t grasp the scale, speed and simplicity of the fraud that unfolded, or how deeply government failures contributed to it.
"I think you generally have a sense that your government is gonna be fighting for you and spending your money just generally OK, and that was absolutely not the case," Teirab told Fox News Digital.
"The amount of fraud was rampant, it was staggering, and happened really, really quickly. Just over the course of a couple years, the amount of fraud that happened in Minnesota is maybe in excess or probably in excess of a billion dollars, and one of the main prosecutors in a lot of the fraud, the former acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, said the number was likely over $2 billion. So that is what we're dealing with. It's a travesty that our hard-earned taxpayer dollars are being wasted away."
The scheme that has garnered most of the national attention involved the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which misappropriated $250 million in COVID-19 funds. But the fraud within various government agencies in Minnesota goes far deeper, Teirab explained. He asserted that the system was set up in a way that made it possible, and relatively simple, for various nonprofits to scam the government out of over $2 billion when it’s all said and done.
"When I was on the Feeding Our Future case, the big thing that jumped out to me was, honestly, how easy this fraud was to do," Teirab told Fox News Digital. "I mean, these fraudsters were just saying that they were spending all this money on feeding kids, and they were just making up these PDFs, putting false names into Excel sheets. I could do that in five minutes on a computer if I had absolutely no conscience."
Ultimately, Teirab explained, the social services system in Minnesota was set up in a way where it was designed to fail.
"So the bottom line of this scandal was this: that there were supposed to be these different organizations, like Feeding Our Future, they were supposed to be a sponsor of different food sites that would give out food to kids who purportedly need it," Teirab said. "And so this Feeding Our Future was supposed to be the watchdog of these food sites. But they were not doing that at all. They were basically getting kickbacks from these sites that were supposed to be giving up food. That was totally false. And they were ginning up the numbers and saying that they fed 3,000 kids a day when they actually maybe fed zero or maybe three kids."
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/minnesotas-fraud-scandal-was-shockingly-easy-to-pull-off-is-likely-worse-than-reported-ex-prosecutor
