Scott Stillman: SF Employment Attorney and MN DHS Whistleblower

Scott Stillman is the name shared by two unrelated public figures who come up in news coverage and search results. One is a San Francisco employment attorney who led a landmark worker misclassification case against Handy Technologies. The other is a former Minnesota Department of Human Services digital forensics supervisor whose early warnings about daycare fraud were later described by federal prosecutors as “incredibly conservative” compared to the roughly $9 billion scheme that followed. Both are worth knowing about, and they are not the same person.

The San Francisco Employment Attorney

Scott M. Stillman is a California employment lawyer and the founder of Scott Stillman Law in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a Stanford University graduate who earned his J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law, where he was the 2009 commencement speaker, and he has practiced employment law on the worker side for more than fifteen years.¹ He is admitted in California state courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and multiple federal district courts in California.²

Workers’ Rights Unit at the San Francisco DA

Stillman served as an Assistant District Attorney and Labor Liaison at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where he founded and ran the office’s Workers’ Rights Unit. The unit handles civil enforcement under California’s Unfair Competition Law along with criminal cases involving wage theft and labor trafficking.³

His signature case there was a joint action with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office against Handy Technologies, Inc., a New York home services company. The complaint alleged that Handy had misclassified its workers, called “Pros,” as independent contractors in violation of California’s Assembly Bill 5, denying them healthcare, paid leave, and unemployment insurance.³

The case, filed in San Francisco Superior Court as CGC-21-590442, settled on May 18, 2023 for $6 million. Restitution of $4.8 million was earmarked for more than 25,000 California workers who performed services for Handy between March 2017 and May 2023, with the remaining $1.2 million as civil penalties.³ A permanent injunction also required Handy to let workers set their own hourly rates, negotiate terms directly with customers after claiming a job, and reject jobs without penalty.⁴

Private Practice

Before the DA’s office, Stillman was an associate and later a partner at McGuinn, Hillsman & Palefsky, a plaintiff-side employment firm, where he litigated a False Claims Act case that settled for $2.5 million. His current practice covers wrongful termination, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour claims, and whistleblower protection. He has also volunteered as a supervising attorney at Legal Aid at Work’s Workers’ Rights Clinic.¹

The Minnesota DHS Whistleblower

A different Scott Stillman spent a decade at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, eight of those years running the state’s digital forensics lab. He performed data mining on computers and smartphones as part of fraud investigations, and over time he became one of the central figures in exposing what would be identified as one of the largest public benefits fraud schemes in the country.⁵

What He Reported

Investigating daycare providers that participated in Minnesota’s child care assistance program, Stillman reported that centers were billing the state for thousands of hours of services never actually provided, and that during searches of the facilities he never saw children present.⁶

In March 2017, he sent detailed emails to DHS supervisors and the Commissioner’s Chief of Staff warning of what he called “organized crime” and the fraudulent theft of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars through the daycare subsidy program, alleging the funds were being funneled overseas. DHS later said its chief compliance officer knew of the emails at the time, but other senior staff reportedly did not learn of them until a public records request surfaced the messages in March 2018.⁵

In May 2018, Stillman testified before a Minnesota Senate committee that fraud rates in the program ran between 70 and 80 percent, amounting to roughly $100 million in lost taxpayer funds. DHS officials rejected that figure, noting it would represent about half the program’s entire annual budget. Some politicians also tied the fraud allegations to reports of illicit cash transfers to the Middle East and Somalia, though investigators and FBI sources at the time said they had no evidence linking child care fraud to terrorism.⁷

The Lanterman Defamation Settlement

Stillman’s time at DHS was complicated by a 2016 defamation suit brought by Mark Lanterman, an independent forensics investigator who had been an opposing expert witness in an earlier case. Lanterman alleged that Stillman spread false claims to local authorities, including that Lanterman’s employees had impersonated police officers and that Lanterman was under investigation by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office. The state of Minnesota paid Lanterman $65,000 to settle, and Stillman signed a letter apologizing for making false statements and acknowledging he had used his DHS email account to circulate them.⁷ Stillman later said he was coerced into signing under threat of losing his reputation, home, and pension, and called the resolution a tactic “designed to disrupt my credibility” as a fraud investigator.⁶

Resignation and Later Vindication

After the settlement, Stillman said his supervisory responsibilities were stripped and he was redirected to internal human resources investigations rather than fraud cases. He alleged that he and colleagues ran into “roadblocks” when presenting cases for prosecution, with officials citing insufficient evidence or reluctance to pursue cases because of the sensitivity of racial issues.⁶ He resigned in March 2018 and publicly called for an independent federal investigation by the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security.⁵

His allegations prompted the Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor to open its own investigation.⁷ A 2019 review by that office described Stillman as an “honorable man” and a “talented and intelligent investigator,” and concluded that prior claims he had made false statements were either based on ignorance of the situation or an attempt to deflect from serious underlying problems.⁶

The scheme turned out to dwarf even Stillman’s own estimates. In December 2025, U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson described what had been happening at Minnesota daycare and feeding programs as a “staggering industrial-scale fraud” estimated at $9 billion, and said Stillman’s original projections had been “incredibly conservative.”⁶ The matter grew into one of the largest pandemic-era fraud prosecutions in the country, with his early warnings cited as evidence the problem could have been addressed years earlier.

1
Scott Stillman Law. About Scott Stillman
2
The State Bar of California. Attorney Licensee Detail, Scott M. Stillman
3
San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins Announces a $6 Million Settlement and Permanent Injunction in Worker Protection Lawsuit
4
WorkCompAcademy. Handy Technologies Resolves Misclassification Claims for $6M
5
Fox 9. Whistleblower Reported Daycare Fraud and Possible Link to Terrorism to DHS Management
6
NewsNation. Minnesota Whistleblower Alleged Fraud Findings Targeted
7
MPR News. Day Care Fraud, Scott Stillman, Minnesota Questions