Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit joined federal agents Thursday in executing search warrants at two Twin Cities autism therapy providers, Iska Inc. in St. Louis Park and Bright Horizon Therapy Center in Edina. Ellison’s release leaned hard on the optics: agents from his unit partnered with HHS-OIG and the FBI, both entities are under investigation for Medicaid fraud. He said, “We will keep holding fraudsters accountable without fear or favor.” He also recited the office’s preferred stats: 358 convictions since 2019 and $90 million in judgments and recoveries.
The timing is not subtle. The searches landed the day before a planned White House “War on Fraud” event in St. Cloud that was originally headlined by Vice President JD Vance (he later canceled; the press conference continues with other officials). Midterm voting is days away. The release reads less like a breakthrough and more like a press statement designed to reframe Ellison as the adult in the room on a problem that metastasized on his watch.
The numbers undercut the “we’ve been on it” narrative. State data reviewed by the Star Tribune show Iska received more than $16.7 million in Medicaid autism payments from 2018 to 2025. Bright Horizon received nearly $17.7 million from 2020 to 2025. WCCO/CBS reported Bright Horizon billed under $200,000 in 2020 and more than $7.5 million last year. That is explosive growth inside a program the state itself later labeled high-risk for fraud. Iska was also billing a housing-support program the state shut down over fraud concerns; Bright Horizon billed adult mental health rehabilitation services. FOX 9 reported Iska was removed from the autism program in May during re-approval after a failed site visit. Five other autism centers had been searched in April.
The broader context is worse. Federal prosecutors have described Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) autism program as going from roughly $600,000 in claims in 2018 to more than $400 million by 2025. In May, the Justice Department charged 15 defendants in schemes totaling over $90 million, calling one case the largest autism-services fraud ever prosecuted. An Optum review and state actions later flagged widespread billing problems. A separate federal grand jury indictment unsealed around the same time charges Jama Mohamod of American Home Health Care with eight counts related to inflating hours for in-home support services and obtaining about $3.2 million on false claims. KSTP had reported the tip in September 2025; the state stopped payments by December. Mohamod has pleaded not guilty.
Ellison’s recovery number also deserves scrutiny. The $90 million figure is judgments and recoveries, not cash in the bank. A KSTP investigation found courts had ordered roughly $32 million in restitution in cases his office prosecuted, but defendants had paid back a little more than $3 million. His own staff has had to clarify on camera that the headline number is not money recovered from the thieves.
The deeper problem is the record of engagement with people later tied to major fraud. In December 2021, Ellison met with a group that included individuals later convicted or charged in the Feeding Our Future case (the $250 million pandemic child-nutrition scheme). Audio of the meeting, later reported by the Center of the American Experiment and others, captures him saying variations of “I’m here to help” and “let’s just go fight these people” in reference to state agencies (his clients) which fraudsters accused of racism and overreach. Campaign contributions from people connected to the group followed. Ellison has said he took the meeting in good faith, did not act on their requests, later returned certain donations, and that his office assisted the eventual federal prosecutions. The tape remains the clearest public record of a top state official offering to run interference for operators who were then extracting massive sums from public programs.
The fair counter-argument is that the system eventually moved: the state flagged autism therapy as high-risk in 2025, the Legislature passed the Medical Assistance Protection Act giving the fraud unit more tools (under a Republcian/Democrat tie in the state house). That doesn't change the fact that providers scaled from negligible billings to multi-million-dollar annual takes for years inside programs already showing classic fraud signals.
These were searches, not charges. No one at Iska or Bright Horizon has been charged as of this writing. That is an important distinction. What is not in dispute is the scale of the money that already left the door, the growth curve that should have triggered earlier action, and the political calendar on which Ellison chose to highlight his unit’s participation. The political strategy here appears to be assuming Minnesotans are too stupid to recognize nothing was done for years.
