Date: May 29, 2025
Contact: newsroom@ci.irs.gov
MINNEAPOLIS — The 71st defendant in the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme has been indicted with two counts of wire fraud following her failed attempt to leave the country for Dubai, announced Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick.
According to court documents, Hibo Daar owned and operated an entity called Northside Wellness Center. In 2020, Daar applied to use Northside Wellness Center as a food distribution site in the federal child nutrition program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. Using Northside Wellness, Daar purportedly served thousands and thousands of meals to children from a small business park on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis. At times, Daar completed and signed meal count forms on which she claimed to be serving 40,000 meals to children from the Northside Wellness site each week. Court documents explain that those meal counts were inflated, and that Daar used false invoices and false attendance rosters to bolster those inflated claims. Daar’s Northside Wellness site submitted over $2.4 million in reimbursement claims. A bank account Daar controlled received more than $1.7 million in taxpayer dollars from those claims. Financial records indicate that Daar used only a tiny portion of those dollars to purchase food and instead transferred most of that money to family, associates, and to herself. Court documents further describe that Daar paid $72,000 in bribes to a Feeding Our Future employee to ensure processing of Daar’s fraudulent reimbursement claims.
Federal agents apprehended Daar at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport this week before she could board a flight booked to Dubai. Daar is currently in custody pending a detention hearing scheduled for May 30.
“As we have said, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is not stopping. We will continue to investigate and charge defendants who defrauded the government in the Feeding Our Future case—the largest COVID fraud scheme in the country and the single largest case charged in the history of this office,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick. “Our work is not done.”
“Fraud against the government takes money out of taxpayers’ pockets,” said Special Agent in Charge Alvin M. Winston Sr. of FBI Minneapolis. “Criminals who exploit government programs for personal gain will face the full weight of justice. The FBI and our law enforcement partners condemn these actions and will continue to work to protect the public from these damaging schemes.”
This case is the result of an investigation by IRS – Criminal Investigation, the FBI, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Joseph H. Thompson, Matthew S. Ebert, Harry M. Jacobs and Daniel W. Bobier are prosecuting the case.
An indictment is merely an allegation, and the defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
IRS-CI is the criminal investigative arm of the IRS, responsible for conducting financial crime investigations, including tax fraud, narcotics trafficking, money-laundering, public corruption, healthcare fraud, identity theft and more. IRS-CI special agents are the only federal law enforcement agents with investigative jurisdiction over violations of the Internal Revenue Code, obtaining a 90% federal conviction rate. The agency has 20 field offices located across the U.S. and 14 attaché posts abroad.