NW Illinois News

The Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) was already under scrutiny after unhappy residents complained that they couldn’t get a hold of anyone during the pandemic, but a July 26 report reveals just how deep a hole the agency was in. A report from the Illinois Auditor General revealed that IDES overpaid more than $5 billion, and on July 26, state Sen. Win Stoller (R-Germantown Hills) issued a statement.

“Merely on the surface, the fact that this audit reveals that IDES was estimated to have improperly overpaid unemployment benefits to the tune of more than $5 billion is nearly unfathomable," Stoller said, according to his website. "However, it only gets worse the more you dive into the full report. Doing so reveals that IDES made over 10,000 payments to deceased individuals, more than 90,000 payments to incarcerated individuals and intentionally turned off fraud detection safeguards."

A Yahoo/Fox News report notes: “Of the $5.2 billion, the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) overpaid by about $2 billion for regular unemployment insurance and by $3.2 billion for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, put in place following the outbreak of COVID. Overall, $2.8 billion has been classified as identity theft -- money not considered recoverable, since it can't be collected from the identity theft victim. According to the audit, only about one-tenth of the total $5.2 billion has been recovered.”

"To top it off, out of this $5 billion, only roughly 10% has been recovered by the state," Stoller continued on his website. "Additionally, the state borrowed $4.5 billion from the federal government for unemployment benefits, only for us to find out in this report that money was essentially used to cover fraud. The people of Illinois deserve better than this disastrous mismanagement by the Pritzker administration.”

The report, published on July 26, is available here.

WAND TV reported that despite IDES' claims that the limits of the federal pandemic unemployment aid system and data errors were the biggest problems when it came to determining eligibility, the auditor’s office said that IDES didn’t use specific controls to ensure that people’s self-certification was accurate.

This isn't the first audit that has pointed out fraud and issues with the PUA program during the pandemic. In 2022, the auditor's office found that "of the $3.6 billion in PUA paid out from July 2020 through June 2021, nearly $1.9 billion was found to be fraudulent, mostly due to identity theft," according to a July 2022 report from The State Journal Register.