Far-left Minnesota Democrat Peggy Flanagan’s lieutenant-governor’s office was roiled by severe internal control failures, illegal spending, and widespread noncompliance while she and failed vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz oversaw at least $9 billion in fraud, a 2025 audit revealed.
Deputy Legislative Auditor Lori Leysen detailed 12 separate findings, highlighting a pattern of persistent neglect: four out of five relevant findings from an earlier 2022 audit were still unresolved.
Flanagan, the party’s nominee for U.S. Senate, faces Republican Michele Tafoya to replace Democrat Sen. Amy Klobuchar in November.
The 2025 audit covers July 1, 2022, through December 31, 2024 and showed Flanagan’s office operating with complete disregard for fiscal accountability, statutory spending limits, and basic recordkeeping.
One of the major revelations in the audit shows a casual, dismissive attitude toward misspent public funds. According to Finding 3 of the report, Flanagan’s office routinely overpaid separated employees and made no meaningful effort to claw the money back. When asked in April of 2025 why leadership hadn’t attempted to recover thousands of taxpayer dollars improperly handed to former staff, Flanagan’s office claimed it was simply “not in the public interest” to do so.
Her office also flouted transaction limits with state purchasing cards. However, Finding 12 revealed that cardholders in Flanagan’s office deliberately skirted these rules by splitting large purchases into multiple transactions. Those included a total of $7,893 for flowers and $7,343 for furniture made in back-to-back installments to skirt a $5,000 single transaction limit.
The auditor’s office noted that internal controls failed to prevent the violation, revealing that the cardholders involved had not even signed updated use agreements since October 2015.
The audit also exposed the office with numerous basic math errors, missing paperwork, and double-paying state agencies on the taxpayer’s dime.
Flanagan’s staff overpaid invoices for state airplane usage after making mistakes on travel dates, according to documentation from the Minnesota Department of Transportation. Flanagan’s office paid both the original incorrect invoices and the new ones. Out of 40 tested employee reimbursements, 14 contained errors (miscalculated mileage, improper meal claims, and basic arithmetic mistakes).
Most shocking, 40 out of 41 vendor payments tested lacked completed documentation, including missing price quotes to prove competitive bidding and absence of packing slips or delivery confirmations proving the state actually received what it paid for.
“Overpaying employees, losing state property, and stiffing vendors for months—it’s no wonder massive fraud is exploding across state government,” Minnesota Senate Republican Leader Mark Johnson said in a statement on the audit.
State lawmakers have also said the previous 2022 audit resulted in six major findings, five of which remained relevant, and Flanagan’s office failed to fully resolve four of them.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/10/05/audit-reveals-widespread-financial-chaos-in-minnesota-democrat-peggy-flanagans-office/
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