[POWERLINEBLOG] Acting United States Attorney for Minnesota Joe Thompson called a presser for 11:00 a.m. yesterday morning. I attended the presser along with several other news hounds to hear his statement and ask a few questions.
Thompson called the presser to announce indictments and criminal complaints in eight new fraud cases against ''Minnesota men'' with such resonant names as Mokhtar Hassan Aden, Mustafa Dayib Ali, and Khalid Ahmed Dayib. Aden founded the company Brilliant Minds Services LLC and operated it with Ali and Dayib out of the Griggs-Midway Building on University Avenue in St. Paul. The business model was built on defrauding Minnesota's first-in-the-nation Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program.
''Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren't just over-billing,'' Thompson explained. ''These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that that's unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.''
The remaining five Minnesota men against whom charges were announced yesterday sport equally resonant names: Abdifitah Mohamud Mohammed, Christopher Adesoji Falade, Emmanuel Oluwademilade Falade, Asad Ahmed Adow, and Anwar Ahmed Adow.
In the blurb prepared for the presser, we learn that the HSS program seems almost to have been designed to facilitate fraud: ''By design, the Program had low barriers to entry for new providers and for beneficiaries. The program also had minimal requirements for reimbursement. The HSS Program's low barriers to entry and minimal records requirements for reimbursement combined to make the program susceptible to fraud.'' You might almost say the ''Minnesota men'' were entrapped!
Mr. Thompson emphasized that the charges against the eight defendants announced yesterday were just the first wave in this particular fraud case. More are on the way. |