During the previous summer, we highlighted the investigation concerning fraud in a Minnesota non-profit named “Feeding Our Future,” created to provide meals for children in need during the COVID-19 pandemic. A legislative audit conducted in mid-2024 disclosed potential fraudulent activities amounting to $250 million within the organization.
With such a vast sum, a substantial number of children could have been supported. Shockingly, 70 individuals were implicated and accused of embezzling the funds rather than using them to feed hungry children. Subsequently, the House Education and the Workforce Committee issued a subpoena to Minnesota Governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, requesting documents connected to the scandal.
Now, there’s another development.
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The clip says in part:
The recent actions seek to indicate that federal authorities are continuing their examination of potentially new suspects involved in the $250 million pandemic-related fraud. Recently, the FBI conducted a search at the premises of a non-profit, New Vision Foundation, which had influential figures from the business sector on its board of directors. Despite being recognized for its work in teaching coding and digital literacy to underprivileged youths and receiving praise from Mayor Melvin Carter, the organization’s office in an industrial park on Vandalia Street in St. Paul was raided. An unsealed search warrant specifies that New Vision Foundation is the latest entity under scrutiny in connection with the $250 million Feeding Our Future meal program fraud case.Â
An exhibit from former Feeding Our Future Executive Director Amy Bock’s trial shows that they paid New Vision Foundation more than $2.5 million in taxpayer money in 2021, after New Vision claimed to serve more than one million meals to children. But according to the search warrant, the FBI belived the meal count sheets such as these claiming to feed more than 3,000 kids two meals every day are phony.
Workers at the electronics recycling site that leases New Vision the office told the feds they never saw any children either being served meals or otherwise. Another red flag pointed out in the search warrant, allegedly phony invoices, claiming they bought their food from a supposed food service company located within Eden Prairie, that actually turned out to be an apartment.
This isn’t just fraud, if all these allegations are true. It’s lazy, incompetent fraud. And, we might add, this investigation seems to be like an onion, just one smelly, tear-inducing layer after another.
