The Auditor in the Middle

Fifty-plus LLCs in Ohio. USDA money in Minnesota. One audit signature bridging two states in the daycare fraud era

INVESTIGATIONS: By Walter Curt

If you want to understand why daycare fraud keeps metastasizing—why it jumps jurisdictions, mutates structures, and survives “oversight”, stop staring at the storefronts and start reading the paperwork. In Ohio, the Somali Education and Resource Center (SERC) sits at the center of a sprawling, multi-entity footprint—dozens of LLCs operating under a nonprofit umbrella, with tens of millions in federal funding flowing through systems the public barely understands. In Minnesota, a Minneapolis nonprofit funded through USDA child-nutrition programs was certified as compliant by an Ohio-based accounting firm. That same firm has since faced serious disciplinary action from Ohio regulators. The interstate connection isn’t a politician. It isn’t a vendor. It’s the compliance layer, the auditors, who are supposed to slam the brakes.

Ohio residents are waking up to a problem that Minnesota has already lived through: the daycare money is big, the controls are soft, and the “nonprofit” label is being used like a hall pass.

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