Republican lawmakers fear fraud in Idaho day cares. What do the numbers show?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Republican lawmakers call for pause to child care funding in Idaho.
- Health and Welfare Department finds 16 cases of potential fraud amid over 1,000 reviews.
- Idaho health department is conducting extensive audit, with results expected in 60 days.
As a fraud scandal unraveled in Minnesota, revealing the theft of over $1 billion in taxpayer money in recent years, online activists decided to do their own sleuthing into some of Idaho’s own government subsidies.
Those efforts raised a flurry of suspicion that culminated in a late-December letter from two Republican state lawmakers. They called for the Idaho Health and Welfare Department to suspend recently authorized government subsidies for child care programs until “program-integrity and fraud-prevention safeguards” were in place.
The investigations and enforcement actions in Minnesota “have revealed systemic vulnerabilities in child care subsidy programs similar in structure to Idaho’s,” Rep. Josh Tanner, R-Eagle, and Sen. Brian Lenney, R-Nampa, wrote to Juliet Charron, the department’s director. Their letter also raised concerns about “potential vulnerabilities” within Idaho programs.
Tanner did not respond to a question about what they meant by that phrase.
In response, Health and Welfare has surged its oversight capacity to review all providers receiving federal money through the Idaho Child Care Program, said AJ McWhorter, a spokesperson for the department. It anticipates sharing results from this review within 60 days, he told the Idaho Statesman on Friday.
In the meantime, the department has released some data from its own routine audits of child care providers. That data shows little in the way of fraud among Idaho day care providers receiving Idaho Child Care Program funds.
In 1,045 routine, randomized evaluations of child care providers receiving money through that program since 2022, Idaho Health and Welfare identified 16 cases of “questionable or poor business practices” in which it took some kind of regulatory action, McWhorter said.
He shared the dates on which the department sent notices of regulatory action, but did not provide dates that these business practices, which “potentially” include fraud, occurred. On Friday, he told the Statesman that providing such dates would be challenging, because some less-egregious problems might stretch over years of citations, improvements and then repeated citations.
“The program works to bring providers into compliance, which can take some time and sometimes is not successful,” he said in an email. “That’s when regulatory action is taken and could include termination or potential referral for prosecution.”
Idaho Health and Welfare has taken increasing numbers of regulatory actions against providers in recent years, from five in 2022 to 25 in 2025. But there is little evidence in this data that those actions related to heightened fraud: Of the 45 actions the department took in that period, 29 were for health and safety issues. Only eight concerned poor business practices, according to department data.
In response to a question about how this number of concerns among day care providers compares with other programs the department administers, McWhorter said only that the department is “committed to protecting children, families and public funds” and “aims to prevent fraud, waste and abuse in all its public programs.”
McWhorter didn’t directly answer a question from the Statesman about whether the department had been able to substantiate tips it had received from Idaho residents who reached out in recent weeks in response to the problems in Minnesota.
“The department has established processes for fraud and abuse identification and mitigation,” McWhorter told the Statesman by email. “Outcomes may range from correcting an overpayment to more serious and intentional provider misuse. Whichever the outcome, it is treated very seriously, and next steps are taken to resolve the concern.”
Questions raised about child care subsidies over ‘foreign-sounding names’
Many of the people involved and convicted in the Minnesota schemes were members of the state’s Somali diaspora, prosecutors have said.
One X user, who identifies herself as an “ethnic American,” posted screenshots in December from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s website, which showed the names, owners, addresses and inspection histories of child care providers in Idaho. “Something is up with day cares,” she wrote, but she did not specify what she meant.
Days later, in a Substack post, writer and Republican activist Brian Almon clarified: The X user’s concern, which he shared, was that “dozens, perhaps hundreds” of the facilities and their owners had “foreign-sounding names.”
He wrote that he was just “raising questions” about child care subsidies in Idaho, but that the system of allowing federal funding to subsidize day cares seemed “designed to be exploited.” Refugee-focused organizations like Jannus, he wrote, train refugees to start their own child care businesses that serve only “a small number of children from the same insular community.”
On Tuesday, Almon told the Statesman that he was just speculating about potential concerns in the program and had found no evidence of fraud in his own research.
The Idaho Child Care Program, which is mostly funded by the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant, subsidizes some child care costs for Idaho’s low-income working families, said Greg Stahl, a spokesperson for the Health and Welfare Department.
Child care providers who wish to participate in the program must go through a household health and safety inspection, sign an agreement consenting to background checks and staff training, and agree to audits, Stahl said. Once they are authorized to participate, providers must maintain records, including attendance information.
Lenney’s and Tanner’s letter referred to a separate program — authorized in 2025 under Senate Bill 1206 — that used the same federal funds, which the state had underspent in previous years. In a Jan. 12 letter responding to their concerns, Charron noted that those funds had not yet been awarded or paid out to providers.
This story was updated Friday, Jan. 23, 2026, to add comments from Health and Welfare spokesperson AJ McWhorter about why the department did not provide the dates when potentially fraudulent business practices are alleged to have occurred.
This story was originally published January 21, 2026 at 10:13 AM.
