One chart lays bare the sprawling fraud network Minnesota officials missed

What had been a modest stream of taxpayer dollars to Feeding Our Future suddenly became a flood surging in a year an abrupt spike now at the center of mounting scrutiny and oversight concerns The explosive upsurge occurred during the COVID- pandemic when the organization exploited a federally funded children s nutrition undertaking run by the Minnesota Department of Teaching MDE siphoning off money intended to feed low-income kids It now stands as the nation's largest COVID- fraud scenario MINNESOTA S ANTI-FRAUD SPENDING HAS QUIETLY BALLOONED LEAVING TAXPAYERS TO PAY FOR FAILURE TWICEData from the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor sheds light on how the scheme went unchecked for so long finding that the MDE oversight was inadequate and that its failures created opportunities for fraud State records chart the rise in payments and reveal how the fraud ballooned in plain sight According to information from the state audit payments to Feeding Our Future began in at million That figure rose to million the following year before topping out at million in a staggering increase Even before the pandemic Feeding Our Future was already an outlier READ ADDITIONAL FOX NEWS COVERAGE OF THE MINNESOTA FRAUD EXPOSEBy the end of it sponsored more than six times the number of Child and Adult Care Food Scheme CACFP sites as its peers When federal nutrition dollars surged during COVID- that gap only widened While funding to all meal sponsors increased Feeding Our Future s improvement far outpaced the rest of the system According to the legislative auditor in nearly four out of every dollars sent to nonprofit meal sponsors in Minnesota flowed to Feeding Our Future alone Taken together the numbers show that Feeding Our Future was expanding faster adding more sites and collecting a vastly larger share of federal meal funds than any comparable organization long before state regulators intervened And the oversight failures were just as striking Flawed applications sailed through complaints were never investigated and the nonprofit kept expanding despite repeated red flags What's more in the wake of a years-long million welfare fraud scheme Minnesota taxpayers will now finance a pricey state-level cleanup effort effectively paying for the failure twice after state administrators missed warnings Gov Tim Walz of Minnesota has stated in the past that he is ultimately accountable for the fraud that took place under his administration