Labor Department watchdog concerned Minnesota employment agency misspent $210M

WASHINGTON — The federal government has put the state of Minnesota on blast again — this time for failing to turn over information on $210 million in taxpayer funds allegedly being “misspent” on laid-off workers.The US Department of Labor watchdog last month recommended Minnesota’s employment agency be flagged for “noncompliance” after repeatedly ignoring requests on how it was using 48 federal grants designed to help out-of-work adults get retrained and former prison inmates find work, among other programs.Labor Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito accused Minnesota of “deliberate obstruction.”“Our auditors and investigators are zeroing in on this failure, and we will enforce full accountability.Strong federal oversight is non-negotiable.

We will not allow this defiance to enable fraud or to cheat American workers,” D’Esposito said in a statement.The concerns about potentially misspending $210 million follow a year in which the Land of 10,000 Lakes has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration for allowing fraudsters to bilk taxpayer-funded programs out of as much as $9 billion.But the state told The Post, the feds “unprecedented” requests were too intrusive.“OIG requested sensitive private information involving more than 30,000 Minnesota residents and workforce program participants,” the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) said in a statement.While the state “takes seriously its responsibility to administer federal workforce programs and cooperate with appropriate oversight, we take equally seriously our responsibility to protect private information entrusted to us by Minnesotans.”The Labor Department Office of Inspector General initiated an audit last April on 48 active federal grants from the Employment and Training Administration to the Minnesota state agency to ensure it had “accurately reported participants’ enrollment, services, and outcomes in accordance with federal requirem...