Where Is This Money Going?': Senator Hawley Presses For Answers On Where Taxpaye

Senator Cornyn, let me just come back to you. I want to get a handle here on just the scale of the fraud in Minnesota. We talked about the dark money groups funding much of what's going on on the ground, but let's just get a handle here on the scale of the fraud. You are a member, I want to get this right, of the legislative, the Office of the Legislative Auditor. I'm sorry, go ahead. Mr. Chair, of the Legislative Audit Commission. Audit Commission. You oversee the Office of the Legislative Auditor. Okay, got it. So you've got access to all of this information. Give me your best estimate, based on the information you've seen, the audits you've seen, how many of the agencies, 20 or so agencies I think in the state of Minnesota, public agencies, how many have rampant fraud? All of them are wrapped up in some sort that can issue, there's 20 primary state agencies in state law. Of the largest, or 10 of our largest primary agencies, many of the nonprofits receive grants and funding from all 10 agencies. If you had to put a number on it, based on what you've seen, your work, your investigations, the audits that you've seen, what do you think the total losses are to Minnesotans in terms of fraud? I think the conservative number is what our federal investigators have determined, of just the 14 Medicaid programs, that half of all of it would be about $9 billion. And I don't think that's, and I think the reason I believe that's true is, in each audit that the Legislative Auditor produces, we measure right level in the samples of what they have done, now 20 to 80% of each one of them, they're unable to prove that the dollars were actually, have gone to the programs in which they're indicated. $9 billion, how much of this money has left Minnesota for overseas? Well, I arrived in 2017, the Child Care Assistance Program fraud, for which the program I believe is $130 million, the whistleblowers showed us that they believe 100 million of that was fraudulent. We had a whistleblower come forward, actually publicly, and at that time we also discovered something new to me, which is the Hawala process of the movement of cash through our airports in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And what I've come to learn, in that year it was just coincidentally $100 million in fraud, suspected fraud, and $100 million went out in cash through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. I've learned that- Tell us how that worked, $100 million in cash through the airport. In suitcases, back then it was a million at a crack. And so I've learned that in the year before it was about $74 million. Secretary Besant just, I've tried for two and a half years to get that number because I wanted to get a view of how many excess dollars are sent out from the community that's sending them. And in the last two years, it was $340 million each year. And so if you look at it, it's about a 25% increase over this period from 2017. That's $1.8 billion in cash. And I don't think the average citizen whose works for their money understands how complicated it is to ship or to obtain $6 to $7 million of cash every single week of the year. And our federal government certainly must have been aware of it and has done nothing to look at it. But that's just, all but about $130 million, I think, is originated out of Minnesota. But what every American taxpayer absolutely understands is their federal tax money being taken on suitcases out of this country to go heaven knows where. I mean, if that's not infuriating, I don't know what is. And the fact that it is systemic in Minnesota, and probably to your testimony, Mr. Talco, probably systemic in a lot of other places. I mean, millions of dollars in suitcases out of an airport, and that's just one means of shipping this money around. It's absolutely unbelievable. I want to come back to you, Mr. Talco. You testified that about a trillion dollars, you think, is lost in fraud every year. Where's this money going? I mean, we know where some of it's going in Minnesota. It went overseas. It went to Somalia. It went to NGO fronts. We know where it's gone in some other states. California gave away billions of dollars to a pro-Hamas NGO. But a trillion dollars nationally, where's this money going to? I appreciate that question, because most people don't ask that question. It goes to terrorism. It goes to child trafficking. It goes to drugs. It goes to terrorism. And then it's used to purchase luxury items, cars, purses, homes. That's all funded by people like me that pay taxes. So you're telling me that the electrician who goes to work every day and clocks in and works his butt off and tries to earn just enough to be able to make his rent, maybe have a kid or two, put food on the table, his tax money is being used to buy other people, luxury items, cars, yachts, whatever else, and is going to fund terrorism and child trafficking? Yes, sir. A trillion dollars a year on this stuff? A hundred and fifteen million dollars an hour. How do they get their hands on it? What are we talking about here? Trends, national organizations, criminal networks, how do they get their hands on this money? They take advantage of antiquated government systems and processes. They go into programs that they know elected and appointed officials won't touch. And they can steal at scale. And what happened really was during the pandemic, between the PPP loans and the unemployment insurance, they learned a really valuable lesson. Government never runs out of money. And the probability of getting caught is virtually zero. I have it at one-tenth of one percent. So come back to the recommendations that you mentioned in your opening statement. What do we need to do to put a stop to this hemorrhaging of people's hard-earned money, going overseas to finance child trafficking and luxury yachts? What needs to happen here? It's really simple. It's used every single day in the commercial sector. Front-end identity verification. You just don't get to say, I am who I say I am. Second, recertification of all the recipients. There is so much fraud right now in the benefit programs all across the country. We need to get a baseline. Third, is this notion of a third-party independent audit. And finally, is involving federal law enforcement, like the Secret Service, to investigate it. The thing that people don't understand is that most of these beneficiaries, Senator, they're not real. They're fake. They're someone's stolen identity that is getting used in all 50 states.