Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is rolling out a program that will pay tipsters up to 30 percent of the fines collected from financial criminals, a move aimed squarely at the sprawling health care fraud networks that have siphoned tens of billions from taxpayers, the New York Post reported.
The program launches Monday alongside a Financial Crimes Enforcement Network advisory that will put U.S. banks on high alert, directing lenders to watch for suspicious transactions tied to health care fraud schemes. Together, the two actions represent the sharpest enforcement signal yet from a Treasury Department that has spent months tracing the money trails behind some of the largest welfare scams in American history.
The timing is no accident. President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 promising a government-wide zero-tolerance approach to fraud. Vice President JD Vance held the inaugural meeting Friday of a new anti-fraud task force he chairs. And Bessent himself visited Minnesota in January, ground zero for a network of alleged scams that have cost taxpayers at least $9 billion since 2018.
A confidential Treasury document obtained by the Post spells out the terms plainly:
"Individuals located in the United States or abroad who provide information may be eligible for awards if the information they provide leads to a successful enforcement action that results in monetary penalties exceeding $1,000,000."
Informants stand to collect between 10 and 30 percent of the proceeds when criminals are fined more than $1 million. The payments come directly from the fines, not from taxpayer funds. The IRS already runs a similar tipster program under Treasury's umbrella, but this initiative extends the bounty concept into the broader financial-fraud space.
A Treasury official briefed on the matter framed the stakes in blunt terms:
"Our citizens have a right to know that their tax dollars are not being diverted to fund acts of global terror or to fund luxury cars for fraudsters."
That reference to terror is not rhetorical. The Post reported that Somali scammers in Minnesota allegedly funneled taxpayer cash to overseas real estate and even to Islamist terror networks like Al-Shabaab. Bessent told Fox News that Treasury is probing whether fraud-related funds may have reached the terror group directly.
The scale of the alleged fraud in Minnesota defies easy summary. One scam alone, involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, saw $250 million taken from funds meant to provide food to children. The broader pattern includes fake autism clinics, phony food distribution sites, and ghost housing services, all allegedly designed to drain federal welfare programs.
The investigations have already produced real consequences. The Justice Department brought criminal charges last year against 324 defendants for alleged participation in $10 billion worth of health care fraud as part of Operation Gold Rush. Earlier rounds of charges targeted 85 Somali nationals, Breitbart reported, in cases involving alleged misuse of federal childcare, food, and human services funds.
A House committee has accused the Walz administration of stonewalling a congressional probe into hundreds of millions in welfare fraud, a pattern of evasion that has only sharpened federal investigators' interest in what Minnesota state officials knew and when they knew it.
Bessent himself made the connection explicit when he announced the enforcement push. He said the department is targeting certain money services businesses used by Somalis in Minnesota to send funds overseas, including to Somalia.
"We are going to offer whistleblower payments to anyone who wants to tell us the who, what, when, where and how this fraud has been done."
He added a line that will resonate with anyone who has watched organized fraud rings operate: "We know that these rats will turn on each other."
The whistleblower program is only half of Monday's announcement. FinCEN's new advisory will tell financial institutions to be vigilant in identifying and reporting suspicious transactions potentially related to health care fraud schemes. The 18-page Treasury missive raises as many as 24 red flags that banks should watch for when processing transactions.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act, financial institutions must file a Suspicious Activity Report when they suspect money laundering or fraud. The new advisory makes clear that Treasury expects banks to treat health care fraud with the same seriousness as terrorism financing or sanctions evasion.
The document scheduled for release Monday states the problem directly:
"Fraud, including health care fraud and government benefits fraud, also continues to be one of the largest sources of illicit proceeds in the United States."
It adds that "health care fraud has increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic", a period when emergency spending loosened oversight and created vast new opportunities for criminal exploitation.
The Treasury missive describes how the fraud pipeline works in practice:
"This is often facilitated by paying kickbacks and bribes through recruiters and marketers to complicit doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other medical professionals for fraudulent, non-existent, exploitative, or unnecessary medical care."
That description points to a system far more sophisticated than petty grift. These are organized operations with professional facilitators, corrupt medical providers, and layered financial channels designed to obscure the money trail.
Separate congressional inquiries have probed the broader web of Somali-linked financial dealings. Rep. James Comer has demanded records on business dealings stretching from Kenya to Dubai to Somalia, part of an expanding oversight effort that now runs parallel to Treasury's enforcement track.
Bessent has already shown he is willing to impose serious financial penalties on institutions that fail to police their own transactions. Just three weeks before the whistleblower announcement, Treasury hit New York-based investment bank Canaccord Genuity with a record $80 million civil fine for failing to monitor suspicious trading.
Investigators said Canaccord failed to file at least 160 suspicious activity reports covering thousands of questionable transactions between 2019 and 2022. The allegations focused on a Cyprus-based firm that allegedly helped Russian oligarchs move money out of Russia, a case that illustrates how lax compliance at a single institution can enable global financial crime.
The Canaccord fine sends a clear message to every bank receiving the new FinCEN advisory: Treasury is watching, and the cost of looking the other way just went up.
Meanwhile, the revelation that HHS has tied Somalia's UN envoy to a healthcare firm accused of fraud adds yet another dimension to the sprawling investigation, suggesting the corruption may reach into diplomatic circles.
A 2022 study by the Colorado State University Global White Collar Crime Task Force estimated that Medicaid and Medicare fraud costs at least $68.7 billion each year. Other estimates cited in the Treasury documents put the figure above $70 billion annually. Either way, the numbers dwarf the budgets of most federal agencies.
The Treasury missive frames the consequences in terms any taxpayer can understand:
"These schemes threaten the integrity of both the US health care and financial systems, impose enormous costs on taxpayers, waste critical resources for beneficiaries of these programs, and increase the cost of health care in the United States."
That last point deserves emphasis. Every dollar stolen from Medicare or Medicaid is a dollar that drives up costs for the Americans who actually depend on those programs. The fraud does not just rob the Treasury. It robs patients.
Treasury plans to issue a Geographic Targeting Order requiring enhanced reporting by certain money services businesses through FinCEN, Just The News reported. The IRS will also examine those businesses, with added scrutiny on funds going to places such as Somalia. Bessent framed the stakes in stark terms: "Under @POTUS' leadership, the @USTreasury will not stop until we fully investigate this deeply disturbing scam."
The pattern of alleged fraud in Minnesota has also drawn attention to other cities. Seattle's mayor declined to investigate welfare fraud claims involving Somali-run organizations, a decision that looks increasingly difficult to defend as federal investigators tighten the net.
For years, the scale of health care fraud in the United States has been an open secret, a line item that everyone in Washington acknowledged but few treated as a genuine enforcement priority. The COVID-19 pandemic made it worse, flooding the system with emergency cash and stripping away the already-thin safeguards that were supposed to prevent abuse.
What Bessent is building is not a single investigation. It is an infrastructure of accountability: whistleblower incentives to generate leads, bank advisories to cut off the money, geographic targeting orders to follow the cash overseas, and record-setting fines to punish institutions that fail to do their part. The 63-year-old former hedge fund manager is applying private-sector discipline to a public-sector problem that has festered for decades.
Open questions remain. The exact legal authorities underpinning the reward program beyond the Bank Secrecy Act framework have not been detailed publicly. The specific identity of the Treasury official who provided the on-the-record statement has not been disclosed. And the full extent of the alleged pipeline between Minnesota fraud proceeds and Al-Shabaab remains under investigation.
But the direction is unmistakable. The Trump administration is treating financial fraud not as a cost of doing government business, but as a crime that demands the same tools, informants, surveillance, and serious penalties, that law enforcement uses against drug cartels and terror networks.
Seventy billion dollars a year buys a lot of fraudsters a lot of luxury cars. Paying whistleblowers a cut of the fines is the kind of common-sense move that makes you wonder why it took this long.
