The allegations led President Donald Trump to withhold federal child care funding from all states until they could prove their systems weren’t being taken advantage of. The allegations have also encouraged some on social media to conduct their own quasi-investigations of child care centers here in Ohio, which has a large Somali population.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has since tried to quell the notion that widespread fraud is occurring within the state’s system, but Williams said Thursday that he’s heard from plenty of Ohioans who have sent in “overwhelming requests for better oversight of our publicly funded child care system in Ohio.”
The bill
“The legislation we are introducing attacks fraud at the root by making attendance reporting verifiable, audit friendly and enforceable in real time, and it requires the state to shut off public money the moment fraud is suspected,” Williams said of his bill, which is jointly sponsored by Rep. DJ Swearingen, R-Huron.
The central component of his bill, Williams explained Thursday, is that “every child care center receiving public tax dollars must install and maintain a camera system that will allow visual inspections in real time.”
Those cameras would be installed in every entryway and exit “with clear lines of sight to the interior and exterior of every entrance and exit,” along with cameras in “general child care areas where services are provided.” This excludes bathrooms and changing rooms, Williams said.
Ohio’s system contains about 5,200 child care facilities throughout the state and around 100,000 children per day. It’s a state-run program that uses federal dollars and, in Ohio, facilities are paid based on a facility’s attendance — not enrollment — which theoretically creates a financial incentive to inflate attendance numbers.
To combat this possibility, Williams’ bill calls for the Ohio Department of Children and Youth to create a monitoring system through which the agency can tap into facilities’ cameras at a moment’s notice. Williams said this would help the agency inspect more child care centers (the agency reports about 10,000 unannounced visits in 2025) and verify whether children that were logged as present for the day were actually in attendance.
The bill also includes a strict requirement that DCY stop administering funds to facilities that are suspected of “waste, fraud, abuse, false attendance reporting or material misrepresentations” until the state conducts a “full investigation and adjudication.”
Williams said the bill would also restructure the state’s enforcement mechanism, which is largely handled by DCY now before being passed on to local prosecutors.
Under this bill, preliminary investigations would be handled by DCY, and the agency would then have to hand over the case to the Ohio auditor’s office within 48 hours if the investigation seems to substantiate waste, fraud, or abuse. The auditor would conduct a full investigation and, if the office believes fraud took place, the case would be turned over to the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for prosecution.
“This ensures that fraud is not quietly handled internally, like we’ve seen, and not forgotten or swept under the rug because the department or the administration does not want to have a black eye or appear to demonize a particular community or group,” Williams said.
Credit: Avery Kreemer
Credit: Avery Kreemer
Yost, also in attendance Thursday, told reporters that he welcomes his office having a greater role in ensuring public funds are being used in the right ways.
“I think this is a salutary and necessary movement,” Yost said. “Why is it necessary? Because we are aware of instances in which there was no referral made to the auditor of state and where everything was simply handled internally.”
It’s not clear where DCY or the DeWine administration stand on the bill, but DCY Director Kara Wente put her name behind a competing fraud-prevention bill introduced by Reps. Phil Plummer, R-Butler Twp., and Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., earlier the same week. That bill would give the AG the power to step in at the behest of a handful of other government agencies or officials, including DeWine, DCY or the legislature.
When asked for comment on Williams’ bill, DeWine spokesperson Dan Tierney told this outlet that the office is “reviewing the proposal.”
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Avery Kreemer can be reached at 614-981-1422, on X, via email, or you can drop him a comment/tip with the survey below.
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