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A Twin Cities nonprofit investigated alongside Feeding Our Future in a scheme to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers has lost its bid to resume participation in a federally-funded child nutrition program.

 at the Minnesota Court of Appeals, an attorney for Partners in Quality Care argued that the Department of Education (MDE) illegally cut off PIQC from the Child and Adult Care Food Program and disqualified its leaders from future participation. 

 that regulators at MDE gave PIQC a meaningful opportunity to correct problems and did not violate the group’s procedural due process rights.

MDE distributes federal funds from the USDA programs to participants in Minnesota. In 2024, Legislative Auditor Judy Randall issued a 

 that found MDE’s “actions and inactions” opened the door to widespread fraud. 

Several of the defendants convicted of submitting fraudulent reimbursement claims for meal sites sponsored by Feeding Our Future also operated sites that PIQC had sponsored, but prosecutors have not filed charges against any PIQC employees or board members. Investigators noted in court filings that like Feeding Our Future, PIQC’s revenue grew dramatically during the pandemic because of fraud.

In 2024, jurors at a federal trial in Minneapolis 

 with ties to a Shakopee restaurant guilty of stealing $47 million from the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the Summer Food Service Program. FBI forensic accountants determined that around $40 million of that flowed through PIQC, and prosecutors say the $40 million figure is in addition to the approximately $250 million allegedly stolen by the operators of several hundred Feeding Our Future-sponsored meal distribution sites.

In an email to MPR News on Wednesday, PIQC attorney Emily Asp writes that the nonprofit respects the judicial process but adds that MDE has been determined to cast blame for the fraud on PIQC while avoiding responsibility for its own oversight problems. 

“The result is that, for now, eight PIQC individuals have been disqualified from future involvement in the CACFP despite none of these individuals nor PIQC ever having been indicted for any type of fraudulent conduct,” Asp writes. “Meanwhile, MDE has not been held accountable for its lack of oversight of taxpayer funds in one of the largest cases of fraud in U.S. history.”

At oral arguments in March, Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Joe Weiner argued that MDE was well within its authority to halt the payments to PIQC. Weiner added that the nonprofit’s managers should have known that managers of its sponsored meal sites were committing fraud when they claimed to have served food to more than two thirds of Minnesota’s 850,000 children.

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A Twin Cities nonprofit investigated along with Feeding Our Future has lost its bid to resume participation in a taxpayer-funded child nutrition program.

Court denies nonprofit’s bid to rejoin fraud-addled food program

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