Gov. Tim Walz has permanently appointed Shireen Gandhi as commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, the very agency she oversaw as massive fraud schemes drained millions in taxpayer dollars from programs designed for vulnerable Minnesotans. The announcement landed on Monday, the same day a state committee grilled Gandhi and her deputies over a third-party audit that flagged an overwhelming majority of autism service reimbursement claims as potentially fraudulent.

The timing is remarkable. Not remarkable in the way politicians usually intend their announcements to be. Remarkable in its brazenness.

Walz, in his announcement, praised Gandhi as someone who "understands that protecting public programs and delivering high-quality care go hand in hand." He credited her with "strengthening program integrity, rooting out fraud, and ensuring taxpayer dollars reach the Minnesotans who rely on these services." The audit tells a different story.

The Numbers That Speak for Themselves

According to the Washington Examiner, the DHS hired Optum in October 2025 to conduct an audit assessing the department's handling of social services fraud. The report, released roughly three months into a yearlong, $2.3 million contract, analyzed more than a dozen "high-risk" programs. Its finding on autism services was staggering: over 90% of claims submitted by early autism intervention centers did not clearly match policies or procedures.

State Rep. Kristin Robbins, chairwoman of the Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, put the finding plainly:

And in the specifics, they talk about some very basic stuff, like some of these companies had no phone numbers. They had no website. So please tell me how those places were even allowed to bill a dime to the state?

Between 2018 and 2023, the number of autism service providers in Minnesota surged from just 41 to 328. That is an eightfold increase in five years. Out of the $1 billion that DHS could have saved by following better-written policies, over half of that, $703 million, was spent on autism services alone.

Providers with no phone numbers. No websites. Billing the state hundreds of millions of dollars. And not a single person at DHS raised the alarm loudly enough to stop it.

The Commissioner's Defense

During questioning at the House hearing, Gandhi could not verify the 90% figure. Her response to the audit's findings was to urge caution about what the numbers actually mean:

A flagged claim does not necessarily indicate fraud, and it doesn't even necessarily indicate that the service was incorrect in any way.

She added that "our analytics need to continue to be refined." Deputy DHS Commissioner John Connolly acknowledged the severity more directly, calling the 90% flag rate "a huge concern" while noting the agency would need to "dig into this with the vendor to further sort out the different analytics."

In a September 2025 interview, Gandhi admitted her team "did not understand the complexity of the fraud scams" and that the claims "looked legitimate on the face." This is the person Walz just promoted permanently. She has described the program she built as chief compliance officer as "a national model for program integrity."

A national model where nine out of ten autism claims get flagged.

Warnings Ignored

The red flags were not invisible. They were waving.

In April 2024, Hennepin County Social Services Manager Susannah King emailed DHS directly about what she was seeing on the ground:

Clients have stated that they are promised housing by this provider and are told that they will receive $50 if they get the PSN completed and generate referrals for the provider.

No action was taken to address that report. A county social services manager told the state agency, in writing, that providers were paying vulnerable people cash to generate referrals and complete paperwork. The department sat on it.

Meanwhile, a social media account claiming to represent hundreds of state staffers raised concerns about the agency's oversight practices. Former commissioner Jodi Harpstead resigned in February 2025 amid public scrutiny surrounding those very practices. Gandhi, who served as deputy commissioner overseeing budget-related operations, stepped into the temporary role. Now the temporary has become permanent.

Accountability as a Foreign Concept

Republican lawmakers did not mince words. GOP state House Floor Leader Harry Niska framed the appointment as a reward for failure:

To this day, not a single employee or commissioner has been fired or disciplined for allowing criminals to steal billions of dollars away from the very Minnesotans these programs were meant to serve. That's not accountability. That's failure rewarded.

Republican state Sen. Paul Utke, the ranking minority member of the Health and Human Services committee, called the appointment "misguided at best." He pointed to Gandhi's own words from a recent committee appearance, where she told lawmakers, "I don't think Minnesota has a problem different than any other state in the nation."

Utke's response was direct:

If the head of the agency cannot even acknowledge the current fraud problem, how can we expect them to implement a plan to solve it?

This gets to the heart of it. The DHS did not merely fail to catch fraud. It actively resisted the characterization that fraud existed. The agency launched a fact-check webpage designed to dispute the very idea that Minnesota has a fraud problem, calling coverage of the issue "targeted misinformation," even as it acknowledged that certain factors "thrust Minnesota into the spotlight." The agency's own fact-check page concedes that Minnesota's fraud problem is "uniquely bad" while simultaneously framing scrutiny of that problem as misinformation.

That is not a communications strategy. It is a contradiction operating in plain sight.

Transparency Without the Transparency

The audit report itself presented another problem. Several sections were heavily redacted. Robbins noted the irony during the hearing:

This is the report, so everyone knows. There's not a lot of transparency here.

A $2.3 million contract to audit fraud, and the public gets a redacted document. Lawmakers asking questions get a commissioner who cannot verify the central finding. The governor responds by making her appointment permanent.

This is the pattern Minnesota's DHS has established: warnings arrive, warnings are ignored, fraud metastasizes, scrutiny builds, the agency disputes the problem's existence, an audit confirms the problem's scope, and the official who presided over it all gets promoted.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

Conservatives have long argued that the sheer scale of government social programs creates inherent vulnerabilities to fraud. Minnesota is now a case study. When a program expands so rapidly that the number of providers grows eightfold in five years and the agency tasked with oversight cannot distinguish legitimate claims from fraudulent ones, the system is not working. It is hemorrhaging.

The people harmed most are not abstract. They are Minnesotans who actually need autism services, whose programs are now under a cloud of suspicion because the state failed to police the money flowing through them. They are taxpayers whose dollars vanished into entities with no phone numbers and no websites. They are the county workers like Susannah King who flagged the problem and watched nothing happen.

Walz says Gandhi brings "the experience and accountability needed to safeguard vital services while building a system Minnesotans can trust." Niska says not a single person has been fired or disciplined. Both statements cannot be true.

Minnesota is not building trust. It is promoting the people who lost it.