Prairie State Wire

Republicans are banding together in their demands for more answers from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) after a recent Illinois Auditor General report raised red flags about the agency’s whole system of operation.

“We’re asking for really just a bigger time frame to look at the program in its entirety, not just a short amount of time, to give us a bigger, more transparent picture of what has happened,” state Sen. Sue Rezin (R-Morris) told CentralIllinoisProud.com.

Rezin and fellow state Sens. Jason Plummer (R-Vandalia), Dave Syverson (R-Rockford) and Win Stoller (R-Peoria) are among a group of Republican lawmakers demanding that the last 13 months of IDES activity be thoroughly scrutinized, warning that deficiencies in the system could carry a price-tag of up to a billion dollars for already cash-strapped taxpayers.  

"Under the failed leadership of Gov. Pritzker, the unemployment benefit system, which is designed to help Illinoisans in need, has now turned countless citizens into victims," State Sen. Terri Bryant (R-Murphysboro) said in a recent post to Facebook.

In addition, the Auditor General’s report calls for a full examination of the system, raising concerns about what it views as the administration’s failures when it comes to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) Program.

“This report shows that fraud and identity theft were allowed to run rampant while Governor Pritzker dragged his feet, and this is just the beginning of what we’re uncovering,” Bryant said. “For months, I’ve joined with my Republican colleagues to voice our concerns with IDES’s continued closures and the inability of the agency to address the numerous claims of fraud and identity theft.

Researchers also pointed to instances where they claim Pritzker and his administration failed to validate the identities of roughly 5,000 claimants before paying out somewhere in the neighborhood of $42,000,000 to them and paying out benefits to dozens of deceased individuals.

“Measures could have been put in place to help protect the citizens of this state, but Governor Pritzker refused to act,” Bryant said. “No more excuses. We need to gauge the full extent of the state’s mismanagement.”

Earlier this year, Bryant also sponsored legislation calling on the Auditor General to conduct a full audit of IDES. Senate Bill 113 would also mean a full audit for the unemployment benefits system. Going back to April 2020, the federal government suggested that the state institute more fraud-prevention tools, which Republicans claim the administration never acted on.