Minnesota taxpayers keep learning where their money went under Governor Tim Walz.

The answers keep getting worse.

And auditors just unearthed a mess in Minneapolis that traces straight back to the summer of 2020.

Minneapolis handed out more than 100 contracts and barely checked the receipts

After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Minneapolis leaders went shopping for alternatives to policing. They handed more than 100 contracts to community groups, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune report.

The pitch sounded simple enough. Pay neighborhood organizations to stop violence before it starts, and the city could lean less on cops.

Now the Minneapolis City Auditor has released the Neighborhood Safety Contract Management Audit Report, a 60-page review of spending from 2020 through 2025. Auditors concluded the city is “not providing sufficient contract oversight or managing contracts effectively.”

The dollar figure is not small. Minneapolis has spent more than $36 million since 2023 on five major violence-prevention programs.

Contractors often turned in invoices with thin paperwork behind them, the auditors found. City staff sometimes cut the checks anyway, even with records missing and questions still open.

And the Neighborhood Safety Department had no standard way to conduct and document site visits, which means nobody could reliably show that the groups performed the work taxpayers bought.

One point deserves precision. The audit did not identify a specific instance of fraud. Auditors warned that weak controls created a heightened risk of fraud and improper payments.

Department Director Amanda Harrington told the Star Tribune that staff made 140 site visits between spring 2025 and 2026, though not with the documentation auditors wanted. A Minneapolis city spokesperson told Fox News Digital, “We’ve taken several steps since the audit report to improve our processes and contract oversight.”

But the city did not go looking for this on a whim. Local outlet MinneapoliMedia reported that a legal settlement required the audit after attorney Dean Thomson sued Minneapolis over how it managed violence-prevention money.

Bill Glahn saw this coming three years ago

Center of the American Experiment policy fellow Bill Glahn started asking questions about the city’s violence-interrupter program back in 2023.

His analysis that year noted Minneapolis had committed up to $7.5 million to the program for 2022 and 2023, with another $13 million budgeted for 2024 through 2028. The city had published no substantive evidence that any of it reduced violent crime.

Glahn also dug into the groups collecting the checks. Several had annual revenues or staffing levels far below the size of the grants they received.

One participant, We Push for Peace, had staffers involved in violent incidents outside St Paul grocery stores in 2021, according to Glahn’s reporting. A camera caught one violence interrupter beating a homeless man.

And in May 2026, the Star Tribune reported, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued We Push for Peace, alleging its leaders misused more than $6.5 million. Those remain allegations, and a city spokesperson told the paper Minneapolis had not contracted with the group for more than a year.

“The city seems primarily interested in shoveling money out the door to ‘address’ urgent problems,” Glahn told Fox News Digital.

He does not think Minneapolis is done embarrassing itself, either. “Based on my past reporting on this and other city grant programs, any diligent audit of any city-administered grant programs would produce similar results,” Glahn said.

The same Minnesota pattern keeps showing up on Tim Walz’s watch

Anyone who followed the Feeding Our Future scandal will recognize the missing ingredient here. Nobody showed up to look.

The US Department of Justice calls Feeding Our Future a $250 million scheme that exploited a federal child nutrition program during the pandemic. A federal judge sentenced ringleader Aimee Bock to 500 months in prison.

Minnesota State Senator Mark Koran, a Republican, told Fox News Digital that state officials could have caught it early. He described claims of thousands of people fed out of an apartment and said “all they would have to do is show up and look at it.”

Site visits. That is the whole lesson, and Minneapolis skipped the class.

But the bigger story sits underneath the paperwork. In June 2020, nine Minneapolis City Council members pledged to defund the police. Axios reported in 2024 that the city’s sworn force had shrunk by one-third since 2019, down to 563 officers.

So the city lost hundreds of cops and spent tens of millions on replacements it could not verify. Working-class neighborhoods on the north side lived with the results while activists and politically favored nonprofits collected the checks.

It would be easy to call the whole $36 million stolen. The audit does not say that, and nobody has proved it. What the audit does say is almost as damning, because Minneapolis cannot show the money bought what officials promised.

Retired Navy intelligence officer Phillip C Parrish summed up the suspicion on X. He described a model where officials “stand up a moral emergency, pour cash through politically connected nonprofits, skip site visits and receipts, then scream ‘livelihoods’ when anyone asks where the money went.”

And that is the anti-police agenda in a nutshell. Democrats treated law enforcement as the problem, then treated accountability as optional for everybody they hired instead.

Fox News Digital reached out to Walz’s office for comment. Minnesotans have heard plenty of statements already, through child nutrition money, Medicaid housing, autism therapy, and daycare.

But Glahn offered the line that should worry taxpayers most. “We have not slowed down, there is no sense in which the fraud has been stopped in Minnesota,” he told Fox News Digital in a recent interview.

Plenty of blue cities built the same programs in 2020 with the same urgency and the same loose rules. Expect more audits, and expect them to read a lot like this one.

Sources: Fox News Digital, “New audit in Walz’s backyard exposes massive fraud risk tied to post-George Floyd activism”; Minnesota Star Tribune, “City audit warns of fraud and favoritism in Minneapolis violence prevention programs”; City of Minneapolis, Neighborhood Safety Contract Management Audit Report; US Department of Justice, “Feeding Our Future Ringleader Sentenced to 500 Months”; Center of the American Experiment, “Audit critical of Minneapolis’s violence prevention oversight”; MinneapoliMedia, “Minneapolis audit warns of fraud risk and political influence in violence prevention”; Axios Twin Cities, “Change slow to come in Minneapolis policing 4 years after George Floyd murder”