A nonprofit tied to Minnesota’s pandemic-era meal fraud scandal has agreed to pay the state $18.5 million and dissolve itself as part of a civil settlement entered Thursday with Attorney General Keith Ellison.
Partners in Nutrition is under investigation by the attorney general for allegedly making false claims to the Minnesota Department of Education for federally funded reimbursements for children’s meals between October 2020 and February 2022.
The nonprofit claimed millions in reimbursements for “astronomical amounts of meals that were never delivered,” the attorney general said in a news release on the settlement.
The alleged fraud was similar to the $250 million Feeding Our Future scheme. Partners in Nutrition was a top-level nonprofit that supervised food programs that repeatedly submitted false claims, the attorney general alleged in a lawsuit against the group.
Civil lawsuit
In the state’s civil lawsuit, the attorney general alleged the nonprofit “turned a blind eye to obvious signs of fraud in the food distribution sites that it was responsible for overseeing, actively enabled fraud by altering records revealing suspicious inconsistencies, and knowingly falsified claims and underlying records to increase the dollar value of claims.”
Federal prosecutors have said individuals involved with Feeding Our Future and another nonprofit, Partners in Nutrition, claimed to serve millions of meals at locations that turned out to be mostly empty.
In all, Feeding Our Future claimed to provide 91 million meals at nearly 300 sites between 2020 and 2022, but the majority were never served, according to prosecutors.
Unlike the Feeding Our Future scheme in which more than 70 were federally charged with fraud, individuals tied to Partners in Nutrition have so far avoided prosecution. Ellison’s office said its authority over federal fraud is civil and that county attorneys or federal prosecutors have the power to pursue criminal action. Minnesota is pursuing action against the nonprofit under the state’s False Claims Act.
Thursday’s settlement requires Partners in Nutrition to return all its remaining funds and cooperate with continuing state investigations by providing documents and other records of communication.
If it doesn’t cooperate, it could be penalized a further $1 million. That amount could grow if the attorney general discovers other funds. Partners in Nutrition board President Aaron Twait signed the agreement Wednesday. The settlement doesn’t clear any of the employees or leaders at the nonprofit from future liability.
The $18.5 million will go directly to the state Department of Education, which will then return the money to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — which provided the meal funding during the pandemic.
Meal fraud
Partners in Nutrition’s agreement with the attorney general is the latest development in efforts to recover money from pandemic meal fraud schemes. As of this summer, federal authorities say they have recovered around $75 million of the $250 million lost to Feeding Our Future.
The first raids in the pandemic-era meal fraud cases came in January 2022. The first federal charges were in September that year. Most of the more than 70 charged in connection with Feeding Our Future have either pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial.
In May, a federal judge sentenced Feeding Our Future “mastermind” Aimee Bock, 45, to 41 years in prison and ordered her to pay $243 million in restitution to the USDA.
State officials are partly to blame, independent reports have found. In 2024, an independent nonpartisan watchdog office found “Inadequate oversight” at the Department of Education created an opportunity for a massive fraud scheme.
The report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor found the education department failed to act on warning signs of fraud at the nonprofit and didn’t exercise its authority to hold it accountable.
The auditor’s office said it found numerous instances when MDE failed to properly monitor federal dollars, “especially given information it either had in its possession or should have obtained but did not.”
To date, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has not said if he has fired any state officials in direct connection with the fraud. Walz had initially planned on running for a third term as governor but suspended his campaign in January amid growing scrutiny on his record handling fraud.
Theft from federally funded meal programs run by the Minnesota Department of Education is just one component of widespread fraud affecting the state. Federal prosecutors have also charged numerous people in connection to Medicaid fraud.
