An audit of a government department is there to check up on what the government employees are doing, fundamentally. They’re not going to be able to dig in to the operations of everyone having business with the government to make sure they are not defrauding the government in some way.

It’s not that audits shouldn’t be done, they definitely should. But they’re not a magic crystal ball that reveals fraud.

What’s the magnitude of the problem? A casual search of Minnesota website list over 9,000 licensed childcare providers in the state. Hennepin County (Minneapolis) has somewhere between 1500-2000 licensed providers and somewhere between 30-50,000 Somali residents. The total population of Hennepin County is 1.3 million. Ramsey County (St. Paul) has between 8-10,000 Somali residents.

There are between 80-105,000 Somali residents in the state. Most (80-90%) live in the metro Twin Cities area.

Extrapolating from the Washington state data (which is broken down by county and primary language), it is reasonable about 30% of the providers in Hennepin County or 450-600 providers are Somali language facilities. For the entire Twin Cities metro area there could be 1,000-1200. Here’s where some investigative journalism would be helpful. Or state workers that wanted to uncover fraud.

As an aside, Democratic State Senator Lisa Wellman in Washington state introduced legislation to expand privacy protections for personal information of licensed childcare providers, effectively making certain identifying data (such as home addresses, personal phone numbers, photographs, and other details) exempt from public disclosure under the state’s Public Records Act. The bill extends existing privacy exemptions—currently limited mostly to family home childcare providers—to all licensed or certified childcare providers, including those in centers and other settings. Imagine that.

In King County (Seattle), pop. 2.25 million, the state list 349 primary Somali language providers out of 2800 total providers. Almost the entire Somali population in the state lives in King County (around 14,000).

Please explain how that works.

‘Pay no attention to the fraud behind the curtain’ said the Wizzard of Oz.

We are not worthy.

What’s your guess of the number of daycares that would need to be checked up on, to the nearest power of 10, the kind of checking that would need to be done to have caught this particular fraud, and how many FTEs would be needed to do that? Bearing in mind that that’s a single government program…auditors are going to drive out to Minnesota and Nebraska and California and stand in the parking lot while kids are dropped off? And drive out to every small business and see if the people who drive in at 9am are the people submitted for the paycheck protection (and what about remote work?)? And drive out to state universities to see if Pell Grant recipients are going to classes?

Maybe an excellent reason not to have such programs, but what you’re proposing should be the norm is far from practical, which is why this stuff takes so long to catch.

Please don’t bother to cut and paste AI slop. I don’t read it. If I want to know what it says I ask it myself. Nothing that’s done in the normal course of a normal audit would have caught the kind of fraud the Somali daycares are doing.

Gemini AI:

Beyond finances, the government conducts performance audits (economy, efficiency, effectiveness), compliance audits (laws, regulations), IT audits, program audits, and forensic audits, often through agencies like the Government Accountability Office (GAO) or Inspector Generals, ensuring programs work as intended and adhere to rules, not just balancing books.

Here’s a breakdown of non-financial government audits:

Types of Non-Financial Audits

Performance Audits: Evaluate if a government program achieves its goals efficiently and effectively, focusing on economy, efficiency, and program results (e.g., are tax dollars being spent wisely?).

Compliance Audits: Verify adherence to specific laws, regulations, policies, and procedures (e.g., are grant recipients following rules?).
IT Audits: Assess the security, reliability, and integrity of government information systems and data.

Program Audits: Deep dives into specific government programs to check operations, outcomes, and management.

Forensic Audits/Investigations: Look for fraud, waste, abuse, or other criminal activity within programs or by individuals.

Who Conducts Them?

Government Accountability Office (GAO): Congress’s watchdog, performing various audits (performance, financial, program) across federal agencies.

Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs): Independent watchdogs within federal agencies (like HHS, FTC) that audit agency programs and operations.

Agency Internal Auditors: Conduct audits within their own departments, following standards like Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards (GAGAS).

“THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES AND WHAT IT DOESN’T REFUSES TO DO”

It is to laugh.
Of course the impersonation is intended, otherwise no one would look at the video (as you noted in another comment).

@ Jimmy > “If YouTube were smart and ethical it would require everything AI-generated to be labeled as such.”

The disclaimer may qualify, although I doubt many people see it by clicking the “…more” button. Why would they?

Everybody knows —
“Everything you see on the internet is true!”
“The government wouldn’t allow people to lie on the internet!”

Hence the impetus for censoring disinformation, misinformation, and mal-information (by the definition of one side only), because nobody wants to waste time reading lies.

OTOH, these are obvious frauds, and the people being impersonated (which this clearly entails) are starting to bring suits. But the purveyors are more numerous than the victims, just like scammer call banks.

End rant.

Second huxley’s recommendation to read “The Feynman lectures on physics” and anything by Feynman, even the dense stuff.