Rose passes effort to perform full audit of state’s unemployment disaster

For Immediate Release (Press Release) – September 2, 2021

SPRINGFIELD- The people of Illinois may soon be getting some answers on what went wrong with the state’s troubled Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. State Senator Chapin Rose (R-Mahomet), as a member of the Legislative Audit Commission (LAC), passed a resolution directing the Illinois Auditor General to perform a full audit of the program.

The action follows the release of a blistering but limited report that covered roughly two months of the sixteen-month PUA program.

“What we know so far is that the PUA program was an unmitigated disaster that was avoidable,” said Rose. “The Pritzker administration failed repeatedly to get unemployment payments to struggling families and to safeguard the system from fraud. This audit will help us to find out what went wrong and how we can avoid this same type of disaster in the future.”

In July, the Illinois Auditor General released a financial audit of the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES), the agency which oversees the unemployment system. The report noted numerous failures by the Pritzker Administration in its management of the state’s unemployment programs. These failures included the payment of unemployment benefits to deceased individuals. Making the report more troubling, independent news reports have indicated that the Pritzker Administration blew off federal anti-fraud recommendations, making the state more susceptible to fraud. The scale of the potential fraud is enormous. The audit found that nearly $155 million was awarded to potentially ineligible claimants during this period of less than two months. Outside experts have estimated that the state’s losses to fraud are much higher.

Rose’s resolution for a full audit of the program – not just the seven weeks previously audited – passed at the September 1^st meeting of the Legislative Audit Commission.

The Senator also voted in support of a second resolution to audit the Business Interruption Grant (BIG) program. Previous reports raised concerns with that program as well, including grants going to businesses that had already permanently shuttered their operations, the administration’s failure to meet statutory goals for the distribution of grants to downstate businesses, and the prioritization of businesses in some pre-selected zip codes for grant funding.