The corruption scandal in Minnesota is a terrifying mirror of the global plunder of taxpayers’ money — empty buildings, invented children, and billions disappearing
Nick Shirley, a young investigative “YouTube journalist” (as he describes himself) who doesn’t come from big media houses, simply took publicly available data on child care centers in Minneapolis, printed out the addresses, and went to visit them with his camera on the whole time. What followed went around the world in a few days and opened one of the biggest corruption taboo topics. The story, though here tied to the American state of Minnesota, is globally known. Taxpayers’ money is massively stolen, in billions, through fake organizations, associations, and similar actors connected to local politics. Tenders are “printed,” candidates know where and when to apply, and huge sums move from workers’ pockets to criminals’ pockets. To make matters worse, the arm of the state is involved, or it has to be — someone has to carry out the transfer of stolen money. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, because this is by no means just an American story.
The video lasts about forty-two minutes, and from the very beginning, the viewer follows a very simple logic. On paper, it says that there is a center here receiving state subsidies for dozens of children. In reality, at that address, there should be a lively space, with traffic from parents, children, employees, infrastructure. Shirley arrives, parks, films, and compares what the state claims with what the eyes see.
The media quickly labeled Shirley as a “MAGA journalist,” meaning a Trump supporter. But his work is so direct that he could be a supporter of anyone — that immediately becomes less important, because what he shows doesn’t deal with economic jargon but with scenes that are intuitively understandable to everyone. Empty parking lots in the middle of the day, darkened windows, locked doors, improvised signs. In the frame appears the infamous “Quality Learing Center,” a children’s center with a sign clearly written by someone who doesn’t know English well (it should say “learning”). In a few moments in the video, a local interlocutor also appears who helps him read documents from Minnesota’s subsidy system and claims that those same facilities have been receiving millions of dollars in public money for years. Precisely that combination of very simple logic and very large numbers led to the video becoming viral, for good reason.
When you look at what was exactly filmed on the ground, the story becomes even more concrete. The pattern stands out especially, not just individual cases. A place that documents claim is a child care center with almost a hundred enrolled children looks like an abandoned office, without a playground, without children’s equipment, and without any crowd. Another facility, formally registered as a place where parents should bring children, at the time of filming has lowered blinds, no working hours on the door, and not a single car around the building. The third, fourth, fifth cases follow an almost identical pattern. In the video, shots of empty parking lots and windows through which no activity is visible alternate, while the author, on the go, compares those scenes with clear, official numbers on the paper in front of him.
On several occasions, he tries to make contact with people inside. He knocks on doors, someone cautiously peeks out, sees the camera, panic rises, short dialogues are interrupted as soon as he asks a concrete question about “where are the children” who should be present. In one case, employees later explain that their working hours are different from what official data suggest and that they work in a narrow slot during the day. Still, when the same pattern of empty facilities and closed doors repeats at multiple addresses in the same city on the same day, it’s hard to talk about coincidence or a wrongly chosen filming moment.
The third layer of the story opens when those shots are combined with the numbers that have been passing through Minnesota state accounting for years. The centers Shirley visits are not small local projects but formally registered providers of child care services that have received million-dollar amounts from public programs. In one case, almost four million dollars are mentioned that ended up at the center with the misspelled sign! When he adds up for about a dozen addresses he managed to visit in one day, the author arrives at a figure of over a hundred million dollars in suspicious payments, and he precisely presents that number in the video as the key point, emphasizing that it’s only a small sample within the entire system.
The way that money formally went to the centers is actually simple. Minnesota’s child care subsidy system works so that the state reimburses costs per child and per hour, based on the reported number of enrolled children and the facility’s working hours. If a center is registered for ninety or more children, and the paperwork says it operates all day, every reported shift creates new hours that the state pays. In theory, that model enables quick and flexible support for lower-income families. In practice, if there is no real on-site oversight and serious verification of what is written in the forms, the same model becomes an ideal tool for extracting huge sums of money through facilities that exist almost exclusively on paper. Precisely that discrepancy between the declared capacity and what the camera recorded at those centers’ addresses explains why one seemingly simple drive around Minneapolis immediately echoed far beyond the borders of the local community.
In the background of the whole story is the specific way Minnesota organizes the subsidized child care system. The state does not open its own kindergartens but pays private and nonprofit providers of services, based on parents’ applications and contracts with centers. Parents with lower incomes qualify for assistance, choose a registered center, and then the state refunds the center for the hours the child spends there. Everything revolves around the numbers in the applications, the number of enrolled spots, reported working hours, and rates per child.
In such an environment, a center that on paper has 90 or 100 children, but in reality perhaps only a smaller group or even no one, becomes an ideal channel for extracting money. It’s enough to fill out applications in the way the system expects, formally meet minimal registration conditions, and have inspections that are rare and announced. If, on top of that, requests accumulate over the years while the number of officials who should monitor it all remains the same or decreases, oversight becomes more administrative form than a real control mechanism.
When the video came out publicly, the authorities’ reaction was quick, at least at the level of the image they wanted to send to the public. Federal Homeland Security services sent their agents to Minnesota, footage appeared of officials visiting the same addresses where the video author had been, asking questions, knocking on doors, and identifying themselves. In parallel, messages come from the top of the federal police that this is about serious suspicions, that an investigation into a wider circle of fraud in social programs has “been ongoing for some time,” and that the focus will now be further intensified.
The second level of reaction unfolds within Minnesota itself. Agencies responsible for overseeing child care centers go public with statements that certain addresses “have already been subject to inspections,” that announced and unannounced visits were conducted, and that in the past allegedly “nothing controversial” was found. All those claims, of course, greatly offend everyone who watched the 42-minute video work, and now we’re talking about millions of people. How can it be “nothing controversial” at one moment, and at another, almost every door is opened by someone originally from Somalia who avoids every answer?
To understand why this case additionally drew huge attention, one must keep in mind that Minnesota has been carrying the burden of several major scandals related to social programs for years. The most famous is the story of an organization that extracted hundreds of millions of dollars through the child nutrition program during the pandemic years, with the help of fictitious kitchens and inflated meal numbers. Similar things happened in the area of patient transport, where private companies reported rides that never happened, and the system dutifully paid them. In both cases, it was the same pattern: formally correct applications, weak or delayed control, and only later discovery of the scale of damage.
In that context, footage of empty child care centers doesn’t look like an isolated incident but as another link in the same chain. The public in Minnesota is already accustomed to new information about another major fraud in the social assistance segment emerging every few years. The emergence of yet another potentially large scandal where hundreds of millions of dollars are mentioned again inevitably raises the question of whether lessons from previous cases were learned at all or if the system continued operating on the same patterns with minimal corrections? This is almost a rhetorical question! That explains why this time federal authorities decided to react visibly and immediately — the viral nature scared them.
In the end, the question opens about the role of Minnesota’s state leadership in all this, not in the sense of personal participation in fraud but in the sense of political and institutional responsibility. Governor Tim Walz — the choice of the defeated Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for U.S. vice president — and his administration have been signing budgets for years, overseeing the work of relevant ministries, and appointing people who lead agencies responsible for controlling child care programs and other forms of social assistance. When a whole series of major frauds is discovered in one state in a relatively short period, spanning multiple different programs, it’s hard to talk about a mere series of “unfortunate coincidences.” In short, this could have major consequences for him.
The official response is most often a combination of emphasizing what was done and relativizing what was missed. They mention requesting “additional resources for inspection services” (!), launching internal investigations, that some suspicious entities were already closed or sanctioned earlier (were they really?). But at the same time, the fact remains that a young author with a camera in one day managed to show a discrepancy between paper and reality that is rarely seen!
Pinning political affinities on him in this case is a pretty desperate ad hominem attack. For Minnesota residents, its workers whose money was stolen, this is shocking, but they are not alone — such frauds appear all over the world and on every corner. This is a huge taboo topic with a clear reason — all established political parties do it. This in Minnesota might even be a “scam” of a well-coordinated group originally from Somalia, but crime and origin are irrelevant factors here. All groups that get hold of holes in a corrupt system participate in such crime. In America, an explosive political climate has been created, so such discoveries are now possible; elsewhere, the situation might be even worse, but all political options supply their own cronies and criminals through fictitious projects and organizations. Can this type of exposé be a solution? For shock and outrage, yes; for real elimination — hardly. The system itself, in which taxpayers’ money is distributed in this way, is simply impossible to fix except through radical and deep change, but that’s already a much bigger topic that still needs to be opened.
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