🔥 Ilhan Omar SHOCKED — $1M Claim ROCKS DEMS!!!

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:06]Who thinks that a duly elected member of Congress can be deported is stupid and an idiot.

[00:00:14]And anybody and anybody who signs this petition is stupid and idiot. So, did you sign that? No, then I don't know why you should be up here.

[00:00:25]I mean, no, I did not say half of America. No, no, no, no. Once our unit received information we believed was an indicator of CCAP fraud, frankly, we were so inundated with tips on centers receiving $700,000 to over a million dollars.

[00:00:41]Thank you. My name is Jace Watson.

[00:00:44]Chair Robinson, committee members, uh as I said, my name is Jace Watson.

[00:00:49]I'm a retired state employee and have been for almost 7 years.

[00:00:53]Well, I didn't volunteer to be here today. When I was asked to testify, I realized that I had a moral obligation to the honest people of Minnesota to tell you what I experienced.

[00:01:04]As a bit as a bit of background, I was a Minnesota State Trooper for over 34 years serving in many different assignments over that time, including conducting and supervising criminal investigations.

[00:01:16]In mid-2014, I retired with the rank of captain In August of 2014, I was hired by the Department of Human Services as the manager of recipient and child care provider investigations where I worked until mid-2019.

[00:01:33]My job at DHS was to oversee three groups of employees, one being the CCAP fraud investigations unit.

[00:01:41]During my time at DHS, our team of CCAP fraud investigators and I, along with the BCA agents assigned to our group, had a front row seat to watch the fraud happening and we had regular contact with those committing the fraud.

[00:01:56]Beginning in 2017, we became dismayed and shocked by the response of some senior DHS officials to whom we we reported the fraud to.

[00:02:06]As I look back with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I realized that what our team saw was the early stages of a somewhat loosely organized criminal enterprise beginning to pillage Minnesota's public benefits system.

[00:02:23]In my opening remarks, I'm not going to use the names of individuals involved in the events I will describe.

[00:02:29]I'm not here in a vendetta. My goal is to help you understand how this happened.

[00:02:34]I did provide the names to the legislative auditor when I was interviewed in the 2018-2019 time frame.

[00:02:42]You should also know that a few of the senior-level DHS officials who harassed and abused our unit for committing the sin of trying to expose a huge amount of fraud in the CCAP program are still working at DHS today.

[00:02:57]From 2014 to early 2017, our unit received tremendous support from the original Inspector General and Deputy Inspector General.

[00:03:07]These folks, along with the great staff at the DHS child care licensing unit, were the first ones to discover very strange and unusual activity at certain Minnesota child care centers as well as suspicious behavior by their owners.

[00:03:24]This led them to believe that significant CCAP fraud may be taking place.

[00:03:29]The DHS child care licensing staff spent a great deal of time after we were hired teaching us what would be normal activity at a child care center and what would be abnormal or suspicious.

[00:03:43]Um just so you're aware, our investigators were all retired police officers. They average 20 years of experience uh with extensive experience investigating everything from fraud to narcotics trafficking to homicide.

[00:03:57]Uh these were veteran cops, but they knew nothing about child care centers, but the DHS licensing folks took care of us.

[00:04:06]From the beginning, our unit began receiving information, tips, or complaints from a wide variety of sources that we believed were likely indicators of fraud.

[00:04:16]As an example, one day we received a call from a CCAP mother who called to complain that her child care center owner had stopped paying her the monthly cash kickback they had agreed upon.

[00:04:29]Another day, a former co-owner of a center called to say that he had been cheated out of his share of the fraud proceeds.

[00:04:38]Yet another day, a fire department called asking if a child care center was still operating because they had been trying to conduct a fire safety inspection and had made multiple trips there on different days at different times, but there were never any children or staff at the center.

[00:04:56]I checked and found that in the last 12 months we had paid the center approximately $1 million and that they were billing for the care of approximately 90 children at a time during two shifts from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. 7 days a week.

[00:05:13]I wish I could tell you that these types of incidents were rare, but they weren't. This is what our team dealt with on a weekly basis.

[00:05:21]Once our unit received information we believed was an indicator of CCAP fraud, we would prioritize these tips primarily based on the amount of CCAP funding the center received.

[00:05:33]Frankly, we were so inundated with tips on centers receiving $700,000 to over a million dollars that we didn't have time to focus on centers receiving less funding.

[00:05:46]Cases were assigned to investigators who would then conduct research on the center and owner and would then initiate physical and electronic surveillance of the center.

[00:05:56]The surveillance would determine how many adults and children entered the center and the times that they did so.

[00:06:02]This would later be compared with billing records the center submitted for CCAP payment.

[00:06:08]If the investigation to this point indicated significant fraud, the information was shared with a BCA agent who then continued the investigation.

[00:06:18]If warranted, the agent would eventually obtain a search warrant for the center, at which time computers and phones belonging to the owner and business were seized.

[00:06:28]At the time of the search warrant, we ordered all payments to the center to be stopped.

[00:06:34]The DHS forensics lab would then perform forensic examinations on the electronic devices.

[00:06:41]These exams often resulted in us obtaining our most powerful evidence against those committing fraud.

[00:06:48]Here are a few of the examples of the evidence I was shown over the years by lab supervisor and staff.

[00:06:57]From an owner's cell phone, I was shown a text conversation between the owner of the center and a friend.

[00:07:04]The friend had asked the owner, "How much longer are you going to do the daycare scam?"

[00:07:10]The owner replied, "Another year or two. I'm going to buy some nice homes in Nairobi."

[00:07:17]The owner was on public assistance at this time.

[00:07:21]They happened to be on vacation in Dubai when this text conversation took place.

[00:07:27]Up to this point, which was early 2017, in the roughly 2 and 1/2 years of our existence, our unit had directed CCAP payments to be stopped to 11 child care centers that we could prove had fraudulently billed DHS.

[00:07:42]These stop payment orders always resulted in the immediate closure of the center because the centers we investigated never had any private paying clients, only publicly funded CCAP clients.

[00:07:56]Additionally, five cases had resulted in felony convictions for fraud-related crimes.

[00:08:03]I regularly joined with various investigators and agents as we interviewed the owners and employees of the child care centers being investigated.

[00:08:13]More than once, I heard an owner or employee respond when we asked where they first learned about the daycare scam.

[00:08:23]They would say they had first heard about it while in the refugee camp in Kenya.

[00:08:28]These individuals told us that they had heard you could run the scam in a number of different states, but it was easiest and you could make the most money doing it in Minnesota.

[00:08:41]Additionally, at about this same time, the DHS investigators and BCA agents initiated an investigation of another child care center and found a high amount of billing fraud.

[00:08:54]Federal agents from the FBI, the IRS Criminal Investigation Unit, and agents from the US Health and Human Services Office Inspector General were invited to join in the investigation due to some of the unusual activity and suspected crimes that we believe we saw.

[00:09:13]This investigation resulted in the federal indictment in 2017 of the owner of Salama Child Care Center.

[00:09:20]That [snorts] owner eventually pled guilty and was sentenced in 2018 to 2 years in prison and was ordered to pay restitution of over $1.4 million.

[00:09:31]The Salama Child Care Center was located at 1411 Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis.

[00:09:37]That address might ring a bell for some of you because of a YouTube video taken last December at the Quality Learning Center, which was being operated at the same address.

[00:09:50]By mid-2018, our cases had generated some publicity and the legislature then directed the office of legislative auditor to conduct a special review of the CCAP program. You know, August of 2018, as I was preparing answers to questions posed to me by the OLA in an email, I was told by a DHS official to submit my answers to them instead of sending them directly to the OLA.

[00:10:19]When I forwarded my answer regarding what fraud trends we were seeing in CCAP, as I had been directed, I soon had a senior DHS official in my office angry, red-faced, and almost yelling.

[00:10:33]The senior DHS official told me to delete a number of paragraphs of the document that I had sent.

[00:10:42]I then advised this official that I believed what they were telling me to do was illegal.

[00:10:46]I advised them that Minnesota law requires state employees to cooperate with the OLA and to turn over information as requested.

[00:10:57]A few days later, the same official told me, "I just came from the commissioner's office, and they're sending your document to the OLA.

[00:11:06]You better be ready for the blank storm that's coming your way."

[00:11:12]In the following months, members of our unit were harassed and bullied by DHS officials in the following manner.

[00:11:20]First, DHS paid $90,000 to a consultant with no experience in public benefit program integrity or financial fraud investigations to label the CCAP fraud allegations in my email as unreliable and unable to be proven.

[00:11:39]During an interview with the consultants, which became heated, I told them that I really didn't care what they put in their report, but if they said there was no fraud or that our investigators were making this up, that when this became public, their company would lose all credibility.

[00:11:57]I told them that the fraud was so huge that sooner or later it would come to light.

[00:12:04]Secondly, false derogatory information was placed on a supervisor's performance review by DHS officials.

[00:12:13]Third, DHS implemented a continuous improvement program with the fraud investigation unit.

[00:12:22]This process started with the senior continuous improvement official berating our group for approximately 30 minutes, telling us in essence we were incompetent and terrible employees.

[00:12:35]I had never heard of something like this happening to any group of state employees in my 40 years in state government.

[00:12:44]A DHS assistant commissioner was in the room watching this.

[00:12:49]Over the next approximately 6 months, we were directed to attend many group meetings to discuss the investigative process at length, and we were giving homework assignments to work on between the meetings.

[00:13:03]These meetings were led by the same DHS official who had berated us so badly in that first meeting.

[00:13:10]The huge amount of time our team spent in those meetings and on our assignments resulted in investigators and supervisors being unable to conduct hardly any investigative activity over the roughly 6 months of this program.

[00:13:26]As a result of this program, significant changes were dictated to our unit by the lead official.

[00:13:33]Um and this this process the changes to the process in included A, myself and the unit supervisor, keep in mind together between the two of us, we had 70 years of criminal investigative experience.

[00:13:51]We would no longer have the authority to decide which cases would be investigated.

[00:13:56]That would be done by a committee of three.

[00:14:00]Two members of the committee were DHS officials with no experience conducting public benefit or financial fraud investigations.

[00:14:09]I would be the third committee member, although clearly outvoted.

[00:14:15]Next, the amount of CCAP funding would not play a role in prioritizing cases.

[00:14:21]We would spend as much time investigating centers receiving a relatively small amount of CCAP money as those receiving much larger amounts.

[00:14:31]The result of this meant that roughly 50% of our limited investigative capacity would be spent on centers likely billing CCAP for less than $100,000 a year.

[00:14:42]It would also result in our team spending 50% less investigative hours on cases involving centers billing CCAP over a million dollars a year.

[00:14:53]Next, investigators could only contact BCA agents after receiving permission from a DHS official.

[00:15:01]Lastly, DHS officials advised the BCA agents to vacate our building. They would no longer have an office at DHS.

[00:15:11]At this point, in June of 2019, I submitted my resignation/retirement notice effective July of 2019.

[00:15:21]I advised the members of the fraud investigation unit that I was not going to be a party to this.

[00:15:28]In closing, I would like to make the committee aware that the CCAP fraud supervisor and I had each worked for the state for 25 and 34 years, respectively, each of us in the Department of Public Safety at the BCA and the State Patrol, where the theft or loss of even $50 would not have been tolerated.

[00:15:50]I can't tell you how shocked we were to come to the Department of Human Services and learn after a few years that not only was the theft of untold millions of dollars tolerated, but those who tried to stop it would be subjected to the wrath of high-ranking department officials.

[00:16:08]Thank you. That's all for today. Thank you. If you want Global News to keep you up to date on any new developments, please subscribe our channel and forward our content with your friends on social media and email. Thank you very much for keep supporting me. Stay safe. Be blessed.

[00:16:26]Namaste.

[00:16:28]Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.