by WorldTribune Staff, January 13, 2026 Real World News
Dozens of Somali-owned non-emergency medical transportation companies have been collecting government funds while literally transporting no one, according to independent media reports on the latest Minnesota fraud scandal.
Nick Shirley and David Hoch, who have exposed fraud involving billions in taxpayer funds in Minnesota, reported that entire transportation companies in the state exist only on paper. They visited 70 of the companies and found nothing. No offices, vehicles, or business activity at all.
“What I believe is the core of all this is this non-emergency medical transportation. A search showed that Minnesota recognizes 1,020 NEMT [Non-Emergency Medical Transport] companies. Almost 900 of them are Somali-owned,” Hoch told Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Hoch added: “In the second video, Nick Shirley and I went to 16 of them — I’ve actually been to about 70 of them. They don’t exist.”
And when you connect transportation fraud to interpreter services, the scam actually gets bigger. Hoch says that when Somali patients are set to go to the doctor, they suddenly “forget” how to speak English, triggering the use of paid interpreters.
And those interpreters bill around $100 an hour. The interpreters also need transportation, as do the patients. Round trip… appointment after appointment. And all of it is billed to the government. And none of it actually happens in the cases of companies visited by Shirley and Hoch.
Shirley and Hoch visited the transport companies to find the addresses went to places with “no vehicles.” Fronts included “an apartment building. One of them is a liquor store. Another one is a wire transfer. Another one is totally unrelated — it’s a grocery store. There are no vehicles. The vast majority of these companies exist on paper only. They are not real.”
On average non-emergency medical transport companies in the United States have about “20 vehicles and each vehicle generates about $70,000 a year.” Shirley and Hoch noted: “800 companies, 20 vehicles, $70,000 a year? It’s an enormous sum of money that’s going out.”
Multiple news sources, including Minnesota’s Alpha News, have reported that there are suitcases stuffed with cash being taken to Dubai and ending up in Somalia. There is a Byzantine path through which government money is freely given for a Somali-run non-emergency medical transportation system, whose vans have been parked for years.
Hoch advised Bessent: “You gotta drop down like Batman on DHS” — the government agency doling out the money — “because they’re the ones writing the checks. They’re the ones allowing the fraud to happen.”
“Look, you can blame the Somalis but if you stick your hand out and someone puts $100 in it?” he said they’d keep doing it if the government is handing it out.
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