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The race for governor heats up as winter turns bitter cold.

Times are tough for immigrants facing unfounded fraud allegations.

And the state auditor talks about fraud across all publicly funded programs.

That's this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

The filing deadline is still two weeks off, but the race for governor is well underway.

Republican candidate, the fake Rama Swamy campaign with Vice President JD Vance in Toledo on Thursday, as Vance was headed to Minneapolis to speak on what his office described as, quote, restoring law and order in Minnesota and, quote, Rama Swamy said the best way to fight rising costs for groceries, utilities, health insurance and housing is by eliminating the state income tax and launching what the tech billionaire called the biggest property tax rollback in Ohio history.

But he hinted that this midterm year could be tough for Republicans, who control all three branches of the federal government and state government.

we have our work cut out for us.

This year.

2026 is not to be taken for granted.

We have a major opportunity for Ohio to be the state that leads the United States of America back to greatness.

For us to be the state that Texas and Florida aspire to, rather than the other way around.

That's what's coming soon.

But it will require every one of us and every one of you doing your part.

Ramaswamy is facing a may primary challenge from northwest Ohio automotive designer Casey Puch who was on last week's show.

Democratic nominee Doctor Amy Acton, the former director of the Ohio Department of Health, says she's running on lowering costs by looking at the tax code and targeting medical debt.

Wage theft and property taxes.

She also says she's watching as the race to be her opponent in November is tilting to the right.

everywhere I go in this state, Ohioans are saying, and we're seeing record crowds of people that don't know party, and small town and rural everywhere we go.

This has been happening since we first came out.

And I can tell you universally, Ohioans are exhausted by the hate and the chaos and vitriol, exhausted of being pitted against one another intentionally.

You know, what I don't like is that my opponent was a big stoker of this sort of thing.

You know, he has written books.

He's done a lot to pit people against one another, The filing deadline for candidates is February 4th.

As you're watching this, hundreds of millions of Americans are either bracing for or hunkering down, and a winter storm predicted to stretch from Texas to the northeast.

Public safety officials in Ohio said they've prepped for a storm that they expect would be like one that hit during Christmas 2022, which brought blizzard conditions, plummeting temperatures and wind chills as low as 35 below zero.

The Ohio Department of Transportation says the state had more than half a million tons of salt, and 10.5 million gallons of deicer on hand before the storm.

And Odot also advises drivers to once again give plows plenty of room on the roads.

30 plows have been struck in incidents so far this winter.

Immigrants and their families around the country are fighting off fear, hiding in their homes and struggling with hardship in the wake of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In December, I set an operation in central Ohio resulted in ten people arrested, with immigration advocates saying it also resulted in more than 200 people detained, including two US citizens and immigrants, with pending immigration cases, work permits or other legal authorization to be in the U.S.

after that, and the killing of Rene Good by an Ice officer in Minneapolis.

Protests erupted at the statehouse and around the state, including some student walkouts at high school.

Republican U.S.

Senator John Houston is running for election to that seat against Democratic former Senator Sherrod Brown this fall.

He said recently that Ice agents were doing important work in fixing unchecked immigration of criminals into the U.S.

under the Biden administration.

The president said he would conduct the largest deportation effort in the history of the country to fix the errors of the previous four years.

That is an enormously complicated task.

Ice agents are moms and dads.

Our neighbors, they're part of law enforcement that are there to keep people safe.

And by and large, they do a really good job, in accomplishing that.

And I would just urge people don't interfere with law enforcement operations, if you believe that they are detaining or arresting somebody that legally should not be, then go to the courts, use the system that we have the rule of law, to object to assist, but do not try to intervene in an Ice operation because then you get tragedies like we saw in Minneapolis.

And I just give that advice to everyone.

If you in your free to speak out against Ice operations, you are free to help any individual who's been detained.

But do not interject yourself into the process of law enforcement, because unfortunately, tragic things can happen.

The Somali community in Columbus was also hit with unfounded allegations of fraud at child care centers, similar to what happened in Minnesota.

The only state with a higher population of people of Somali descent than Ohio.

That resulted in social media influencers causing conflict as they tried to enter child care and aggressively questioned those who operate them.

Angie Plummer is the executive director of community, Refugee and Immigration Services, or Chris, a nonprofit affiliated with Church World Service that helps place and serve refugees and immigrants in central Ohio.

dealing with?

A lot of unfairly scrutinized.

So they're they're having somebody that had to be an entire field.

It feels like there's been some fraud and.

That doesn't mean somebody as a business is necessarily committing fraud and very worrying about your process going.

Daycare centers that receive public assistance, second and third.

And some of these journalists going around are just making people upset for hours.

There's gonna be a lot of unanswered questions.

You just want to go about your daily life here.

It's the same system sometimes.

Are these people fearful?

I mean, yes, it's been hard for many reasons.

Right now.

So I just I just want to watch this.

We're seeing what's going on in Minnesota, wondering if that's because these.

Two.

Ex-Lover people who work here.

Taking refugees from Texas.

This is your first time Plummer has been with Chris for 23 years.

She has a message for those who have concerns, or even are opposed to refugees and immigrants settling in Ohio or in the U.S.. That's the same here in New York.

There's so much.

More than just like.

It's like.

That's enough experience to see the joy of coming with your product.

But I'm seeing people are stunned.

It's just starting from scratch.

I'm trying to figure it.

From scratch.

It's starting a business.

So I think you have to take the longer you than just like, oh, somebody go walk for six months.

Course they do.

Because it's an investment in the beginning so that they can move on.

I just want to raise it like.

I think something's wrong.

It's hard to have a community like I felt after people all over the world.

I like the picture.

I'm watching children grow up right now in this.

So.

Oh, President Trump also ordered an end to temporary protected status for Somalis, which has been in place since 1991.

As of March 17th, only about a thousand people are affected nationwide because many Somalis are in the U.S.

through refugee resettlement programs and not TBS.

Those allegations against Somali run childcare, with no evidence attached, led Ohio House Republicans to call on State Auditor Keith Faber to investigate.

I talked to Favre about that and other topics related to fraud last week.

It's been said several times that there is fraud in all publicly funded programs.

And that's partly why your office exists, in a sense, to try to do investigations and see what's going on.

Well, certainly our enhanced fraud role is but yes, we know that there are fraud in Ohio programs.

Look, I our office has helped convict more than 154 people for lying, stealing and cheating with government money.

So we know that that's out there.

The question is, are we putting safeguards and controls in place to try and minimize that exposure?

And, in some cases, the answer, unfortunately, has been not enough.

You've got this effort on your website to solicit tips from the public for actionable information that can lead to whatever an investigation might turn up.

Some of this is coming at a time when we're seeing these reports, these allegations of fraud among child care facilities operated by people of Somali descent.

They've been amplified by social media influencers who've been going door to door, knocking on doors to try to find out, do their own investigations, I guess.

And you got a letter from most Ohio House Republicans asking you to investigate.

So are you investigating the Somali daycare situation?

What are you what's the stats?

Well, two things.

First, we investigate any allegation of fraud.

We run 100% of them to ground.

That's why we have a very robust special investigations unit.

And we will do that on any tips we get.

So what we did was made our website more robust for reporting beneficiary fraud.

As I mentioned, that's not an area that we normally go into.

We go into that when we think there's a problem.

There appears to be, at least in Minnesota, a problem in this area.

Is it reasonable for us to make sure we don't have a problem in Ohio, or if we do have a problem, the nature and scope of it.

And the answer to us was yes, we are looking at that.

We actually started that process before it became the social media sensation.

We were doing that back in early December when we first heard about it, and we continued to take a look at that.

With regard to, the other issues that we're hearing, we don't like to say whether it's Somali or not Somali.

But look, the problem in Minnesota appears to be isolated into the Somali community.

We are looking at similar things in Ohio.

The governor came out very forcefully and indicated that Ohio's program for child care is different than than Minnesota's.

And I think that that's correct.

And what we're looking at is saying, first of all, we we register kids based on it, attendance.

They register based on registration, and that's how they pay.

But even in the governor's own program.

To get back to your question, is there fraud there?

He indicated that they have shut down a number of daycare providers based on fraud are based on at least errors in their reporting structure.

And so we're taking a look at that.

We know that the Somali Resource Center, which was one that everybody's been the social media sensation on the governor, indicated, stop getting any state benefits as early as June of this year.

And they went back and found a number of irregularities on their meals.

What the entity was doing is it was seeking reimbursement through a federal program administered by the state for meal payments, and the governor indicated that their meal numbers didn't match the number of meals they were actually providing.

Well, if that is an error, that's one thing.

If it's fraud, it's another thing.

And so what we do when we discover these mismatches is we look to see whether or not we think it's fraud, if it's fraud, we refer 100% of those for prosecution.

We're trying to figure out what's happening in the scenario.

If that happened, then we want to know whether it was prosecuted or whether it's not sometimes criminal cases take years to develop.

Remember we did the Columbus Zoo.

It took over two years from start to finish for those people to be charged and convicted.

You talk about the difference in the Minnesota situation versus Ohio, where governor Mike DeWine has said that Ohio pays based on attendance, not enrollment.

And we kind of had that in Ohio with the electronic classroom of tomorrow, where there was an Ohio Department of Education investigation showing that he was saying that they had more students than they actually were getting, that they had fewer students.

They were actually getting paid for.

But I want to I want to ask, you have things change so that that kind of fraud can be found more easily, or are there other things that need to be done?

Well, certainly we are much more robust in our activities in the auditor's office than they were back then.

Remember, that was essentially the Department of Education changed the way they classified and did students.

They used to look in that scenario for just how many kids you have signed up, not whether or not they're doing learning activities and that was the issue.

The department changed their rubric, Eckert said.

They couldn't change the rubric.

Ultimately, the court said they could, and that made a huge difference on Cots business model.

And because of that, I think we issued a finding for recovery against them for about $117 million in 2022, after a long extended audit to find the money to find the trail.

And so that's a different scenario.

We audit to the standards of the agency.

The Department of Education set forth the rules for education reimbursement.

We audit to those standards in and child care.

We audit to the standards that are set up by the department.

And when we look at those standards, we determine whether or not those have controls to avoid problems.

In the example in the daycare situation was, do you have a control to make sure that the daycare administrators, not swiping kids in when they're not there, they knew they had a problem, so they issued direction to have parents reset their pens because apparently people were swiping people in when they weren't there.

And so that's the kind of thing we need to be looking at.

But again, we aren't limited just to daycare.

We're looking at home health care, we're looking at a whole series of other issues.

And candidly, we know that there are fraud in these programs.

We know that there is fraud in the home health care site.

We know that there are fraud in other places.

So the question is, is does the department have controls in place to minimize that fraud and then to determine, identify and seek out.

And that's one of the areas that are were much more robust now than we were back in 2018.

When I became auditor.

And we are partnering with other state and local and federal partners, in these areas.

So, you know, we've got a bunch of eyes looking at this, but that's why we tell people most of our criminal investigations and our audit side is the day to day keep an eye over government money.

But the criminal side, my special investigation unit, most of our convictions have come from individual tips.

And that's why I tell people all the time, our eyes and ears are much bigger than the the 50 or so people who work in my special investigation unit, we have 11.8 million Ohioans who, if they see something, they should say something.

And that's why we also then this last year had the legislature pass a new fraud reporting act.

And if you remember what that did is it requires government employees, if you see waste, fraud or abuse in the department, you now have an obligation to report that if you're a state agency person, you have to go to the inspector general.

We ask for it to come to us.

The governor insisted it not come to us.

I get it, a little separation between two executive office branch people, but if you're a local government folk, then you have to report to the state auditor's office.

And so those tips, along with the tips from Bob and Betty Buckeye, are what lead to our investigations.

And that's why we enhanced our website to put that public beneficiary fraud reporting right at the front of our website.

So go to Ohio auditor.gov, Ohio auditor.gov.

Click on that red button and report fraud.

If you see something say something.

I'm wondering if you've gotten a flood of those kind of tips from the activities surrounding these Somali daycare centers where you've got these social media influences, is that helpful to you at all?

I mean, they they've put some videos out there.

They're very problematic.

We look at all those videos, and candidly, sometimes the videos are trying to draw a correlation between apples and oranges.

And so we look at those, one of the early videos was on the Somali Resource Center.

It alleged that all of these entities were formed on the same day.

Well, the reports and the data they were looking at said that, give them credit for finding it.

The reality is the database that they went to was reconfigured into the white administration, and it put, dates out there on two different dates.

It just put you on a 1 or 2 date buckets.

And so it looked like that.

But in reality they were formed over a period of time.

The governor answered that question.

But it's interesting.

My people had answered that question to me at least a week before that, because we asked the same question and our people dug deeper and said, okay, what is this anomaly?

That is the benefit of having extra information and access to other resources.

We're able to dig through some of these suspicions, but I still want people to tell us their suspicions, because we were able to run 100% of those to ground.

And so whether you think it's real or not, tell us what you see and what you believe and what we have seen from putting our enhancement on the website enhancement out there, the information we are getting some good tips.

The tips aren't related all to the Somali community.

We're getting tips from Cleveland, we're getting tips from Cincinnati, we're getting tips from all over the state.

And so that is a benefit for Ohio, for us to have a more robust reporting system.

Now, does it mean my people are going to have to work a little harder to sort through the wheat from the chaff?

Yeah, but that's what they do.

They're good at that.

You issue the report a few weeks ago showing nearly two thirds of the companies got tax credits, loans, other incentives, are not fulfilling their end of the deal and not delivering on the promises they made to get these, which were some large, some small incentives.

Is that fraud and how are you?

How can you determine whether that is just we miss the mark or we deliberately defrauded?

Yeah, I would say most of the time that's probably not fraud.

It, you know, it could fall into the waste, fraud, abuse moniker.

But when the government makes a deal with somebody and says, hey, we're going to give you these incentives, whatever they happen to be in your deal is you're going to create 100 jobs at a minimum of $25 an hour.

If you create 50 jobs at 950 an hour, it's got to be more than that at 1250 an hour.

Okay.

Have you ended up keeping your side of the deal?

Our answer is no.

What we do is look strictly at what the deal was.

If you said 100 jobs at $25 an hour and you got the benefits, you're not keeping your end of the bargain.

It isn't the auditor's office, though.

Then go sue them to enforce the deal.

It's the entity that gave them the deal.

And what we find is, is that before we started looking into this, nobody was checking.

Nobody did the follow up for the most part.

And now what we find is even when we find that there are noncompliance in, I think we found over 60% of the entities we looked at had noncompliance, that still there is very little enforcement action to to claw back a lot of the benefits.

Now, in some cases, in some cases, the benefits hadn't been fully delivered yet.

But either way, our audit was predicated on the you made a deal to do X, you didn't do X, you're non-compliant.

Have you turned that over to the attorney general's office?

We have absolutely.

We turned it over to the department first.

And the attorney General's office.

They have the enforcement side of the the ledger.

And, you know, this isn't the first time we've done this.

We've done this a couple of times now, we got that authority to start doing this a couple of years ago.

And now we're also doing follow up when we do these reports as to what has happened to some of these entities.

Now, there were plenty of people that were in full compliance.

They and some people went above and beyond.

That's great.

You know, I'll set aside the public policy discussion, whether it's a good idea to give economic incentives for for people to do that, set that aside.

That's for the legislature.

But remember, when you cut a deal with somebody to cut taxes or to give other benefits, you're picking a winner or loser in the economic circumstance.

And if you're going to do that at a minimum, people ought to keep their end of the bargain.

And finally, cybercrime and cyber fraud, is there enough being done?

What would you want to see?

And how big a problem is cyber fraud, as far as you can tell?

Look, I'll be blunt.

I think we lose more money in Ohio, to cyber fraud in Ohio than we do to employee theft and dishonesty, which is a big statement.

Every week we find out more and more local governments, more and more entities are being hit by ransomware, by vendor redirects.

And the numbers that come across my desk are small.

They're in the tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And so it is very important for local governments, just like it is for your viewers at home, to make sure you're being proactive, to keep yourself from being the victim of cybercrime.

And it goes as simple as senior citizens being victimized.

I always used a beekeeper movie as an example.

I think it's a great movie.

We need more Jason Statham out there to take your bad actors.

But in the end, we know that this is a problem across Ohio and in government.

We're seeing this a big, big issue.

And that's why we issued a bulletin not once, but twice to local governments telling them steps they could take to avoid the vendor redirect.

And this is where somebody calls up and say, hey, this is ABC paving.

We did your parking lot.

I want you to send my check to this new bank account.

I change my banking from Fifth Third to the key bank.

And so here's the new routing number.

Send our check.

Unfortunately, far too many governmental entities get that email or get that phone calls.

Okay?

And lo and behold, the check goes to, you know, scammers are us.

It doesn't go to, ABC paving and then ABC paving calls up and said, hey, I never got my check.

Guess what?

The government entity is still on the hook to pay ABC paving.

And so what happens is, this is a problem and it is costing local governments lots and lots of money.

And so we have issued not one but two bulletins on how to avoid it.

The simple answer is never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, ever accept redirect requests over them, over the phone, over electronic means require people to come in in person.

Is it more owners?

Absolutely.

Will it stop?

Most all of that fraud?

Absolutely.

And so those are the kind of things we do in the auditor's office to help local governments safeguard public resources.

Is the legislature doing enough?

The Republican led legislature doing enough in this area?

Yeah, I again, I would say I don't think this is necessarily a legislative issue right now.

It's an enforcement issue and it's an issue to go education wise.

Look, the attorney general has a role when it comes to consumer fraud.

I, I laugh because I'm surprised my phone hasn't gone off.

I was getting 8 to 10 scam phone calls a day.

How do I know they're scams?

It's telling me, my Medicare eligibility, allows me to go to a different provider.

I'm not Medicare eligible.

All of those are people trying to get a Medicare number to scam, unwary senior citizens.

But I've had the same cell phone number for 25 years, so they assume I must be you know, a senior citizen.

And so that's the problem we see in this problem.

And I do a lot of education, a lot of talking, a lot of spending time with our constituents, talking about how to safeguard yourself from cyber fraud.

And it is a growing area.

Faber is running for attorney general.

Democrats have a contested primary between former Representative Eliot Forehand and Columbus attorney John Lewis.

And that's it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News Dawg or find us online by searching the state of Ohio Show.

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And please join us again next time for the state of Ohio.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter, right, is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at Porter.

Right.

Com Porter Wright inspired every day.

You know, Ohio Education Association representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at ohea.org