Commission Starts Search For Minnesota’s First Inspector General

(KNSI) – The panel that will help pick Minnesota’s first inspector general has started its work.

St. Cloud Senator Aric Putnam says the Legislative Inspector General Advisory Commission held its first meeting Wednesday, working through the job description and the hiring process for the person who will run the state’s new Independent Office of Inspector General. The office was created to investigate fraud committed within and against state programs, following a string of high-profile fraud cases in Minnesota.

Putnam, a co-author of the bill, told KNSI News how far along the process is. “We’re basically getting in the boat before we got to fish. So we’re at the very first, earliest stages of really figuring out both the direction and the vision of the thing and the practical steps to get us there. But we’re in good shape and we’re making good progress.”

He says the office will have real enforcement power once it is staffed. “The inspector general has subpoena authority, so they can actually really get in there and basically be the fraud cops.”

Putnam says state agencies each track grants their own way, and some do it better than others. “We need something outside the agency to make sure that the agency is behaving right, but also independent from the governor and the legislature.”

The office is expected to have roughly 40 employees and cost about $10 million a year. Its work will be limited to fraud involving government programs. Everything else stays with regular law enforcement.

Putnam says the commission is looking for someone with a law enforcement background, an attorney, judge or police chief, who is also a certified inspector general and has experience running a large organization.

The Senate passed the bill on a 60-7 vote in May of 2025, but the House did not act on it until this year. Putnam says a subcommittee begins first-round interviews in the next few weeks, with a list of names going to the governor’s office by the end of December. He expects the inspector general to be named in January and the agency itself to be up and running sometime in 2027.

The office will not stop everyone who tries to game the system, Putnam says, but it gives the state a focused way to go after fraud that no other agency was built to handle.

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