A retired engineer worth more than a million dollars walked into a Stearns County, Minnesota, office in 2016, filled out a SNAP application, and walked out approved for taxpayer-funded food stamps, all without lying on a single line of the form. Rob Undersander collected benefits for 19 months, bought lobster and filet mignon on his EBT card, and then donated every dollar to charity. His point was simple: the system is broken, and he could prove it.
Undersander's case has resurfaced as Minnesota lawmakers weigh a GOP-backed bill to tighten SNAP eligibility. The retired millionaire testified before the Minnesota House Public Safety Committee on March 24, telling legislators that the rules amount to an open invitation for waste.
His story lands in the middle of a much larger reckoning over public benefits fraud in Minnesota, a scandal that officials warn could reach tens of billions of dollars and that has already drawn congressional scrutiny of the state's oversight failures.
Under federal rules, applicants can qualify for SNAP either by meeting financial thresholds or by receiving other welfare-related benefits. States have wide latitude to decide what counts as a "qualifying benefit." In Minnesota, that definition stretched far enough to include receiving an informational brochure about domestic violence services.
Undersander said he discovered the gap while volunteering to help seniors navigate government programs. When he applied in Stearns County, he was issued a domestic violence services brochure. That brochure counted as a qualifying benefit under Minnesota's rules, and his application was approved within weeks, despite his seven-figure net worth.
The mechanism behind this is called Broad-Based Categorical Eligibility. It originated in guidance introduced in 1999 under the Clinton administration and was later expanded during the Obama administration. AP News reported that the Obama administration actively encouraged states to adopt the practice, and more than 40 states plus Washington, D.C., now use some version of it.
The practical result in Minnesota: income was tested, but assets were effectively ignored. A person could hold millions in savings and retirement accounts and still qualify, as long as reported income fell below the threshold.
As the Washington Free Beacon reported, when Undersander later exposed what he had done, Democrats attacked him as a fraudster. But Republican Rep. Mike Conaway pushed back during a prior congressional discussion of the case: "Mr. Undersander did not break the law, he simply abided by the rules that were in place, so he didn't defraud anybody."
Undersander did not mince words in his March 24 testimony. He told Fox News Digital ahead of the hearing:
"I strongly support SNAP benefits for truly needy individuals, but when we have nearly one in seven Americans receiving food support in the wealthiest nation on earth, with historically low unemployment rate, something is wrong."
He went further, framing the eligibility structure itself as the problem, not individual bad actors gaming a tight system, but a system designed so loosely that gaming it requires no effort at all.
"One might call the current eligibility rules fraud by design. And given the current climate of fraud and abuse of taxpayer-funded benefits in Minnesota, I'm hoping that there will be a new bipartisan effort to reduce and eliminate both."
Undersander also told Fox News that he filled out his application honestly. "When I filled out that form, I used an abundance of honesty and caution," he said. The system simply never asked the right questions.
Matt Schmid of the America First Policy Institute put the stakes bluntly: "It's unacceptable that under Minnesota's current system, even millionaires and lottery winners can qualify for taxpayer-funded benefits."
The scale of SNAP spending nationally makes eligibility rules more than an academic debate. Federal SNAP spending hit $128 billion in 2021 and $127 billion in 2022. Last year, the program cost $99.8 billion, with participants receiving an average of $187 in monthly benefits.
Minnesota's numbers tell their own story. State benefits totaled nearly $725 million in 2020. One year later, they surged to almost $2 billion, a 174 percent increase in a single year.
AP News reported that Minnesota estimated roughly 12,000 of its approximately 400,000 SNAP recipients could lose benefits if the federal government barred states from using brochures and similar materials to trigger eligibility. That figure alone suggests the scope of the problem: thousands of recipients qualified not through traditional need but through a paperwork technicality.
The broader fraud allegations surrounding Minnesota's welfare programs have only intensified scrutiny. Officials warn that a wider public benefits fraud scandal in the state could reach tens of billions of dollars, a figure that dwarfs the SNAP loophole but underscores the same institutional failure: a state government that treated oversight as optional.
Minnesota's political leadership has a track record of defending the status quo on benefits eligibility rather than closing gaps. The Washington Times reported that when Undersander first went public, then-Governor Mark Dayton did not thank him for exposing a vulnerability. Instead, Dayton attacked him personally: "If I were him I would have been ashamed to show up and disclose what I'd done."
That response captures something important about how Minnesota's leadership has handled fraud and waste. The instinct was not to fix the hole but to shame the person who pointed it out.
Tim Walz, who succeeded Dayton as governor, now faces his own reckoning. Walz testified on March 4, 2026, before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, which was investigating fraud in Minnesota state social services. The hearing reflected growing federal frustration with a state that appeared unable, or unwilling, to police its own programs. That hearing produced pointed confrontations between lawmakers and Walz over his administration's failures.
The pattern extends beyond SNAP. Minnesota has faced a cascade of fraud-related investigations and guilty pleas tied to its social services apparatus. Multiple family members in one Minnesota fraud scheme have pleaded guilty, and state Attorney General Keith Ellison has faced questions about whether his office moved aggressively enough.
Critics have argued that the state's political leadership had every reason to look the other way. Accusations that Walz resisted investigating fraud to protect political interests have dogged him as the scandals have grown.
GOP state Representative Pam Altendorf has introduced a bill that would tighten Minnesota's SNAP eligibility rules by requiring stricter income and asset verification before applicants can enroll. The bill was the subject of the March 24 hearing where Undersander testified.
At the federal level, a policy set to take effect in 2027 will require states with higher payment error rates to share a portion of SNAP costs. That provision creates a financial incentive for states to clean up their enrollment processes, something Minnesota has conspicuously failed to do on its own.
Federal officials have tried before. During the Trump administration, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue proposed a rule change aimed squarely at the brochure loophole, saying the change was "intended to close a 'loophole' that states have misused to 'effectively bypass important eligibility guidelines.'" That effort faced fierce resistance from states and advocacy groups.
The question now is whether Minnesota's legislature will act where its governors have not. Undersander's testimony puts the choice in stark terms: either tighten the rules or accept that a system designed to feed the hungry is also feeding people who have no business collecting a dime.
Several details remain unclear. The exact bill number for Altendorf's proposed legislation has not been publicly identified in available reporting. Undersander's precise income at the time of his 2016 application, the figure that technically qualified him, has not been disclosed. And the specific Minnesota rule or statute that allowed a domestic violence brochure to serve as a qualifying benefit has not been cited by name.
The Minnesota Department of Children, Family and Youth has been contacted for comment but has not publicly responded to the renewed attention on the case.
What is clear is the gap between what SNAP was built to do and what Minnesota's rules allowed it to become. A program meant as a lifeline for families who cannot afford groceries was handing EBT cards to a man who could buy the entire grocery store.
When the rules let a millionaire eat lobster on the taxpayer's tab and the state's response is to attack the whistleblower, the problem isn't one retired engineer. It's the people who wrote the rules and the leaders who refused to fix them.
