Chairman Ervin and Members of the City Council:
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the City Council Committee on Budget and Government Operations.
I will be brief in my statement this afternoon, and I look forward to your questions. Before we turn to those, I want to do two things: first, to provide an overview of the changes proposed in the FY2026 budget for the Office of Inspector General. The proposed budget for FY2026 includes a loss of three positions and a substantial reduction in funds available for training. The three positions proposed for elimination are a senior information analyst in our Center for Information Technology and Analytics, an investigator II in our Investigations section, and the operations analyst in our Operations section. We have proposed those positions for elimination not because they are not critical contributors to OIG’s work, but because they became vacant late in 2025 and we have prioritized the effort to avoid eliminating filled positions. The proposed reduction in our training budget is also one of necessity; the overwhelming majority of our budget goes to fund salaries for occupied positions, and a significant portion of our non-personnel budget is associated with fixed and recurring costs associated with our information technology systems and infrastructure. Wherever necessary, we maintain IT operations which are separate and independent from those of the City in order to protect the independence and confidentiality of our work. There are limited opportunities, therefore, for significant reductions in our non-personnel spending and we have plans to meet our legal and professional obligations for training with internal and lower-cost options.
Second, before I turn to your questions: as I have elected not to seek reappointment to a second term, this will be the last budget hearing in which I will participate as inspector general. I therefore want to take just a moment to highlight a few of the things we have accomplished over the last four years.
To make sure that as many Chicagoans as possible know who we are, what we do, and where to find us, we built an entirely new, award-winning website. For the first time, we have awareness-raising signs in English and Spanish on CTA buses and trains, along with roadside billboards and electronic public service announcements with contact information to our tipline. We have touched 48 of the City’s 50 wards during this term. To receive and process the increasing number of intakes we receive as a result of those efforts, we entirely rebuilt our intake function, centralizing it within the office to ensure that all of our work is informed by what we hear from Chicagoans. We also rebuilt our Center for Information Technology and Analytics, creating a new, independent section within OIG to further resource our data analysis and data transparency work. That work has included new additions to our public-facing data dashboards, including resources on police overtime spending, 911 calls, and TIF districts. We have also grown our data work to include new, proactive analysis of campaign contribution data, to generate leads which enable us to more aggressively enforce the City’s ethics rules around pay-to-play politics. That represents one important part of our larger effort to enforce the City’s historically underenforced ethics rules; more than 70 percent of the Ethics investigations sent to the Board of Ethics in the last decade have been during this term. Elsewhere in the office, we have studied and reported on the operations on 20 City departments. We were the first and are still the only component of City government to reach full and effective compliance with the consent decree entered in Illinois v. Chicago. Meanwhile, we successfully completed two triennial peer reviews by the Association of Inspectors General, confirming our compliance with professional standards. And finally, with the support of this body, we have successfully pursued critical legislative reforms including the stabilization of the inspector general selection process, the implementation of term limits for the inspector general, and protecting the independence and confidentiality of OIG’s investigative interviews, and ensuring OIG’s access to City records.
I am sincerely grateful to my colleagues at OIG for their hard work in those areas in pursuit of a government which more closely resembles the one Chicagoans deserve. Thank you for your time today, I welcome your questions.
About the Office of Inspector General (OIG)
The mission of the independent and nonpartisan City of Chicago Office of Inspector General is to promote economy, effectiveness, efficiency, and integrity by identifying corruption, waste, and mismanagement in City government. OIG is a watchdog for the taxpayers of the City and has jurisdiction to conduct inquiries into most aspects of City government.
If you see misconduct, mismanagement, or waste, we need to hear from you.
Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube for more information on how OIG continues to fight fraud, abuse, and inefficiency in Chicago government.