State Senator Win Stoller (R-Germantown Hills) released the following statement regarding the recently released performance audit of IDES during the pandemic:
“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. 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.
“To top it off, out of this $5 billion, only roughly ten percent has been recovered by the state. 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.”
