Minnesota Department of Human Services officials allegedly discovered widespread fraud in the state’s Child Care Assistance Program — then quickly disabled the very safeguard that exposed it, according to explosive new whistleblower testimony.

Former DHS employee Scott Stillman told a Minnesota House committee that when officials briefly activated IP address tracking, they immediately detected fraudulent logins from overseas, including Japan. Just two weeks later, the tracking system was reportedly turned off, leaving the state’s welfare payment system vulnerable once again.

Republican state Rep. Krista Knudsen reacted to the testimony, condemning the state agency for “incompetence.” 

 

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One video of the testimony went viral, racking up over 500,000 views by Thursday afternoon.

While speaking to the committee, Stillman said Minnesota officials wanted to find out who was billing and from where. They quickly learned the state’s system “was not designed to include IP numbers.”

“It’s a major oversight,” he said. “It’d be like buying a brand new car that didn’t have brakes.”

Officials insisted they needed IP addresses, so a state employee set up a “temporary IP trap,” according to Stillman.

“It took him a while, but he was able to trap the IP numbers, and he saw people from Japan logging into our state system to bill for CCAP,” he said, apparently referencing the Child Care Assistance Program exposed for potential fraud. 

Republican state Rep. Krista Robbins, the committee chair, asked if Minnesota DHS can now track IP addresses, since it turned off the system after two weeks. 

“The time I left, I was told no,” Stillman said. “But what’s happened in the last seven, eight years – I don’t know.”

In December, YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a documentary in which he took to the streets of Minneapolis, seeking to check in on his fictional son “Joey” at numerous government-funded Somali-run daycares, as The Dallas Express reported. 

One by one, they locked the doors and turned him away, with few or no children to be seen. But they were receiving millions in taxpayer dollars through the state Child Care Assistance Program.

These revelations built on prior reporting from journalist Christopher Rufo, alleging tens of millions of Minnesota taxpayer dollars were funneled through fraud schemes and routed overseas to Somalia, where they reached the terror group al-Shabaab.

Robbins previously told The Dallas Express that state legislators had been warning Minnesota DHS officials and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz about the fraud for months, to no avail.

“They were warned,” Robbins told DX in December 2025. “Clearly, for a year, they have done nothing.”

“No one is ever held responsible. That is the failure of the governor to fire his commissioners, or the people who run these programs, and clean house,” she added. “He has turned a blind eye despite knowing about it. This was in the media, we did a public hearing on it. They did nothing.”