A 28-year-old woman was charged with wire fraud Wednesday for her role in a $14 million scheme to defraud a state autism program.
Asha Farhan Hassan is the first person charged in the scheme and is also accused of receiving $465,000 through her participation in the Feeding Our Future scandal.
“Today’s charges mark the first in the ongoing investigation into fraud in the EIDBI Autism Program,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson.
“To be clear, this is not an isolated scheme. From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network. The challenge is immense, but our work continues,” Thompson continued.
Hassan and others allegedly carried out the scheme from November 2019 through December 2024 using a business called Smart Therapy LLC. Hassan listed herself as the sole owner of the company. However, another woman also had an ownership stake in the company. The unidentified woman previously owned an adult daycare but was excluded by the Department of Human Services (DHS) for three years because of her conduct running the daycare, Thompson’s office said.
Hassan’s company claimed to be providing one-on-one therapy to children with autism under Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) program.
But according to prosecutors, the company’s “behavioral technicians” were often unqualified 18- or 19-year-old relatives.
Hassan and her partners allegedly recruited children into Smart Therapy by approaching parents in the Somali community and paying them monthly cash kickbacks in amounts ranging from $300 to $1,500 per month, per child.
Prosecutors say that parents would often threaten to leave Smart Therapy and take their children to other autism centers if they didn’t get higher kickbacks. In fact, several larger families did leave Smart Therapy after being offered larger kickbacks by other centers, according to the charges, which say the kickback payments came from fraudulent billings to Medicaid.
“Where a child did not have an autism diagnosis and an individual treatment plan, Hassan and her partners worked with a [qualified supervising professional] to get the recruited child qualified for autism services. There was no child that Smart Therapy was not able to get qualified for autism services,” Thompson’s office said.
All told, Hassan’s Smart Therapy obtained more than $14 million in reimbursements from Minnesota DHS and UCare. Many of the claims for reimbursements were fraudulently inflated, billed without providers’ knowledge, and were for services that were not actually provided, prosecutors said.
Additionally, many of the children were dropped off and picked up by drivers who billed DHS for transportation services. “It was a part of the fraud scheme that some of these transportation providers were also on the payroll of Smart Therapy,” according to Thompson’s office.
Hassan allegedly sent hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraud proceeds abroad and used some of the funds to purchase real estate in Kenya.
The new charges come just a week after Thompson’s office indicted eight people for defrauding the state’s Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) program. In a press briefing, Thompson said most of the $100 million program was fraud.
Check out the Fraud in Minnesota page from Alpha News for the latest news about fraud.
Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
