5 years ago. And it looks like the state was actually taking pretty aggressive moves against the fraud including ongoing investigations and legislation to shut down the fraud. [1]
There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video. That's taking the matter seriously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals
>There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video
Oh yeah, the prosecution was sooo active that all the daycares listed as operational and receiving funding, had no kids in them, had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment 3 angry men would come out shouting at you. How many legit daycares have you seen that look like that?
Yes, because when I enroll a child in a daycare I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man and then I demand to see the children. But sure is suspicious that this place has no kids in it when I visit it outside it's posted operation hours.
Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.
Right, everybody, especially the author of this piece, agrees that what Shirley did was bad and stupid. And also unnecessary, because we had documentary evidence from the Minnesota government itself showing the scale of the fraud here.
I doubt Patrick is the world's biggest Nick Shirley fan, but that's not really how it's conveyed in the article.
Shirley gets acknowledged to have "poor epistemic standards" (which is an almost euphemistic way of describing his approach) but Patrick goes on to say that "the journalism develops one bit of evidence...." and even appears to insinuate the NYT erred in reporting it in the context of the Minnesota government's response that the state's own compliance checks had found them open shortly afterwards but that some of them were under investigation.
There's an interesting point to be made that detailed, bipartisan evidence collected by suitably qualified officials that some daycenters were closed at times they were claimed to be open gets less attention than a YouTuber with an agenda rocking up at nurseries at what may or may not have been their opening times, but that's not how it's actually expressed. Rather it seems to be arguing for face value judgements of his video and against journalists that felt compelled to point out that whilst evidence of daycare fraud by Somalis in Minnesota definitely existed, Shirley's videos probably shouldn't be considered part of it.
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."
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The mainstream media was reporting on it 6 years ago. They reported on the 50 convictions too, which people whose information environment is YouTube tend to be unaware of.
Of all the things that threaten the future of mainstream reporting, YouTubers running round Ohio for an hour trying to find people who think Haitians are eatinng the local pets isn't one of them.
He does not in fact call what Shirley did "bad and stupid". He calls him a journalist!
>I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man
How does one wandering around with a camera affect the fact that the daycares had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment then 3 angry men would come out shouting at you?
Do you even hear yourself? Are they Schrodinger's daycares? Do they become compliant the moment you stop filming them?
Tell you what, go get a camera man and go visit your local daycare center. Post on youtube how they respond.
I predict that they would not spontaneously board up the windows and introduce spelling errors into their signage.
You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question:
How does having a camera impact the daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?
> You're beating it around the bush going offtopic and ignoring my question:
No I'm not, you just don't like the answer. But at least you've edited to remove the "3 guys yelling at you" portion as I think even you can see how that might be a reasonable thing to do to a creep going around you business filming everything.
> daycare having a misspelled sign and boarded up windows?
The answer to this question is simple, a poor one. And I suspect that a daycare that primarily gets it's funds from people using government welfare likely isn't rolling in the dough. Broken windows are expensive to fix, boards are cheap. A misspelled sign is embarrassing but again could easily be something that the owner of the facilities just wasn't assed to pay to replace and properly fix.
My spouse worked for years in that sort of daycare which is why it's unsurprising to me that a daycare in that state exists. She, for example, did a full summer in Utah without AC while the kids were fed baloney sandwiches every day. Her's wasn't a daycare committing fraud, it was just an owner that was cutting costs at every corner to make sure their own personal wealth wasn't impacted.
A shitty daycare isn't an indicator of fraud. It's an indicator that the state has low regulation standards for daycares. Lots of states have that, and a lot of these places end up staying in operation because states decide that keeping open an F grade daycare is cheap and better for the community vs closing it because it's crap quality. They certainly don't often want to take control of such a business and they know a competently ran one isn't likely to replace it if it is shutdown.
>My spouse worked for years in that sort of daycare
Was your spouse also one of the all-male crews that those totally-not-a-scam MN daycares typically have?
How many legit daycares have you ever seen where the staff is all men? And aggressive men at that. Just think about it for 3 seconds.
>How many legit daycares have you ever seen where the staff is all men? And aggressive men at that.
None in my entire life. They're all ladies. Any guys are dads coming through.
Now you are going off topic. I suspect because you don't like a reasonable answer that doesn't fit your fraud narrative.
Men can work at daycares but also we have no clue what those guys relationship to the business was.
Just think about it for 3 seconds.
>Now you are going off topic. [...] Men can work at daycares
No mate, YOU are going offtopic. I never said men CAN'T work daycares, I asked you "How many legit daycares have you ever seen where the staff is ALL-MEN?". This is the n'th time in this thread you misread what I say, to the point I can confidently say you're intentionally doing this in bad faith to derail the conversation, which is why this will be my last reply to you.
> also we have no clue what those guys relationship to the business was.
Except they also interviewed MN citizens who live in the area who also said they never saw any kids or women at that daycare with the misspelled "Learing" sign.
How many more points on the graph that form a line do you need to admit that it's an obvious scam?
>I suspect because you don't like a reasonable answer that doesn't fit your fraud narrative.
I just look at the evidence and use critical thinking to judge. You're the one not bringing any evidence to support your not-a-scam narrative and intentionally misreading my questions to give bad faith offtopic answers.
>Just think about it for 3 seconds.
Parroting someone is flattering but not a sign of good arguing skills.
To put it mildly I don't think there's a consensus among Minnesota DFL-types who paid attention to this that the state at any point took the matter seriously in proportion to its severity. There's a lot of evidence that they did the opposite thing. I try to avoid openly identifying my partisan commitments (see this whole thread for why) but: this shit is what we Democrats constantly dunk on the GOP for doing, and we're not acquitting ourselves well here.
It's annoying that we're talking about this in these terms, because the article is about public services fraud, and it's mostly technical, and it's an interesting subject. We shouldn't have to debate Tim Walz to engage with it.
The volume of prosecution that had occurred or was slated to occur was laughable compared to the amount of fraud known or reasonably believed to have occurred. When it is done at scale, prosecution is inefficient and much less effective than reforming processes so as to preempt fraud, which is not something that happened, as evidenced by the continuing fraud after the initial round of prosecution.
FTA:
> So-called “pay-and-chase”, where we put the burden on the government to disallow payments for violations retrospectively, has been enormously expensive and ineffective. Civil liability bounces off of exists-only-to-defraud LLC. Criminal prosecutions, among the most expensive kinds of intervention the government is capable of doing short of kinetic war, result in only a ~20% reduction in fraudulent behavior. Rearchitecting the process to require prior authorization resulted in an “immediate and permanent” 68% reduction. (I commend to you this research on Medicare fraud regarding dialysis transport. And yes, the team did some interesting work to distinguish fraudulent from legitimate usage of the program. Non-emergency transport for dialysis specifically had exploded in reimbursements—see Figure 1— not because American kidneys suddenly got worse but because fraudsters adversarially targeted an identified weakness in Medicare.)