Ryan Thorpe

And when it comes to the true scope of the fraud, it is in the billions.

But in terms of what is the exact final dollar figure going to be here, we don't currently know.

We might not ever know.

Well, I mean, fraud in government welfare programs would have been going on for decades.

It's certainly a longstanding problem.

But at least what sources told me was that they felt like it started to get much worse around 2010.

Not to the kind of crisis level that we've reached now, but things had started to pick up a bit of steam.

And then I think a real kind of

critical moment is COVID, where you just have more money flying out the door than ever before.

And you have some of these programs that are specifically designed to have very few guardrails under the idea that, look, it's an emergency.

We have to have low barriers to entry.

We've got to get money into the hands of people who need it.

So the programs, when you take a look at them, some of them almost seem to have been specifically designed in order to facilitate fraud.

And so I think the fraud predates COVID, but then it accelerates in that point in time and it continues.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that is, look, are we ever going to be able to completely stamp out fraud when it comes to government welfare programs?

Likely not, you know.

But when we're talking on the level that we are here, billions of dollars over the course of a handful of years, like this is a five alarm fire in the state of Minnesota and Minnesotans should be

utterly outraged.