Audit of Chicago Police Department Tuition Repayment

Executive Summary

Eligibility does not require that the courses related to department duties. Program participants are obligated to repay the tuition reimbursements if they resign prior to fulfilling their service commitment to the department. The purpose of the audit was to determine if CPD was effectively administering the $6.5 million program in accordance with the program rules, and identifying former employees who failed to meet program service requirements in order to initiate collection efforts to recover the taxpayer-funded tuition reimbursements.

The IGO found that CPD failed to identify 15 former employees who voluntarily terminated during the period 2008 through August 2012 without having satisfied program service requirements and therefore owed the City of Chicago a total of $180,375 in repayment of tuition reimbursements. Eight of these had been missed by CPD during its review of terminations and seven had not been identified because CPD program administrators were 20 months behind in reviewing terminations. CPD, using the identification of those individuals by IGO auditors, has since forwarded the amounts due and names of the 15 former employees to the City of Chicago Department of Finance for collection.

Although the audit scope was limited to terminations occurring after January 2008, based on the audit results we believe it is likely that other TRP participants who resigned prior to January 2008 were not identified by CPD.

It is important to note that only employees who voluntarily terminate are required to repay tuition reimbursements. Employees who are fired, suspended, required to take mandatory retirement, laid off, on duty disability, or transferred to another City department are exempt from repaying any tuition reimbursements they received.

The IGO audit found a variety of gaps in CPD’s enforcement of deadlines and accurate calculation of reimbursement and repayment amounts. CPD incorrectly accepted 6.2% of tuition reimbursement applications after the program deadline. An additional 49.2% of the audit sample could not be verified for timeliness because CPD did not time-stamp file documents. We also found that CPD overpaid 3.1% of tuition reimbursements due to errors and lack of review. CPD staff acknowledged the mistakes, and that supervisory review either did not occur or did not catch the errors.