As the fraud in Minnesota unfolds, one of the questions I have is who wrote the grants, who signed the grants, and who approved the grants. Well, I think we now have a clue as to how all of this was allowed to happen.

On Friday, The Daily Signal reported:

A new report in Minnesota highlights how a former bureaucrat involved in granting a church millions of dollars later went to work as a consultant for the church.

The audit also says that the church failed to provide necessary reporting for hundreds of thousands of dollars of state funding.

Both the church and the former bureaucrat deny any wrongdoing, and gave their side of the story to The Daily Signal.

According to the report, issued by the Office of the Legislative Auditor last week, a grantee—later identified as Zion Baptist Church in North Minneapolis—”could not provide us detailed invoices or program participant data to support a payment of $672,647.78″ from the Department of Human Services’ Bureau of Health Administration “for a single month of work.”

Zion Baptist Church contracted with 14 subcontractors, two of which the legislative auditor visited. The church reportedly paid $40,000 to each of the subcontractors, without specifying rates per service unit.

Those subcontractors failed to show who they served with the money they received. One of them said “the grantee told them they did not need to keep detailed participant records.”

Finally, the grant manager “who approved the $672,647.78 payment left DHS a few days after approving it and later started to provide consulting services to the grantee,” the report stated.

The article notes:

Department of Human Services staff raised serious concerns about subcontractors during the grant period, but supervisors directed them “not to pursue further questioning,” and approved a grant extension.

The whistleblower said key questions remain, such as the justification for avoiding a competitive process for the grant, whether DHS performed due diligence on the subcontractors, whether subcontractors were for-profit entities, and why staff concerns were not pursued.

The whistleblower also listed four grants that Zion Baptist Church received, two of which were sole source (without competition) and together totaled more than $3 million.

“Is Zion some great place?” the whistleblower asked, noting the multi-million-dollar sole-source grants. One one contract of more than $1.4 million, the church “did just a bad job performance” and the state “cancelled it early.”

This smells more than a little fishy to me!