A Democratic woman who works for Minnesota’s government is speaking out publicly about the lack of guardrails she’s personally witnessed.
The woman, Faye Bernstein, has worked as a compliance officer with the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) for two years. In this position, she’s had access to a variety of contracts.
“I saw everybody’s contracts from our work area [Behavioral Health Administration],” she said in an interview with journalist Ryan Thorpe published at City Journal. “They all funneled through me.”
🚨 BREAKING: One of Minnesota’s DHS whistleblowers just went public.
“I have only voted for Democrats. I consider myself a Democrat. This is definitely not something that the Republicans are making up. This is real.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg. pic.twitter.com/pwPRgF0p9U
— Dustin Grage (@GrageDustin) January 29, 2026
But what she saw was oftentimes no good.
“Over the years, I had often thought that DHS is sloppy, but 2018 and 2019 are when I saw, oh gosh, this is beyond normal — if we don’t have fraud today, we’re going to have fraud soon,” she explained.
As an example, she noted that the Minnesota DHS doesn’t monitor for conflicts of interest.
“I could give a contract to my sister for a million dollars because she has a different last name, pay out that contract, and nobody would notice,” she alleged. “It would have been easy to give a contract to a family member or to a nonexistent person. That’s when I realized, this sloppiness is way beyond normal. We really are at risk of fraud.”
She even had proof that something like this once happened.
“The reason I can confidently say that I could give a contract of this sort to my sister was because I had come across a contract that DHS had given to a former employee who had left the department within the past year,” she explained.
“I immediately recognized her name, so I went to the person who initiated that contract and said, ‘What’s the deal with this? I want to make sure everything’s okay, that we don’t have a conflict,'” she continued.
The guilty party then rushed to her deputy director, who in turn came back to Bernstein and hectored her about why she was “asking these questions.”
“Well, gosh, this is just a perfectly normal question,” she reportedly replied.
“No, it’s not,” the deputy director alleged. “You’re upsetting people. You’ve just made a lot of enemies by asking these questions.”
Oof.
Asked by Thorpe whether this culture helped facilitate fraud, Bernstein said that yes, it absolutely did.
“Where we are today is completely predictable from where we were in 2019,” she insisted. “There was no other way for this to go. The handwriting was on the wall.”
“Until only about a year ago, our whistleblower policy required us to report internally; that did not comply with the law. The only reason was so that they could find out who was reporting,” she added.
Bernstein is by no means alone in her complaints. Randy Anderson of Bold North Recovery told the Minnesota Star Tribune that he started reporting suspected fraud in 2022, only to be ignored and rebuffed.
“I continued raising concerns for nearly two years, yet no one from any of those agencies reached out to learn more until the media started running stories about the very same issues,” he revealed.
“To me, that represents a serious failure by the people charged with safeguarding our tax dollars and our most vulnerable communities,” he added.
These statements from Bernstein and Anderson come amid a flurry of fraud investigations into Minnesota. The investigations were sparked by an investigative journalist who discovered that Minneapolis is littered with fraudulent, Somali-run daycare centers.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt lays out claims of massive fraud in Minnesota:
-86 people charged in widespread Minnesota fraud schemes; 78 are Somali immigrants
-59 individuals convicted so far for participating in plots that stole roughly $1 billion from taxpayers across… pic.twitter.com/mTlAAUgFxC— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 1, 2025
Bernstein said she’s not surprised by what’s been discovered, telling Thorpe that she now feels “vindicated.”
“I was aware that our contracting processes were leaving us completely open to fraud, but to realize the lack of guardrails was pretty shocking,” she said.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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