Metro East Sun

A report from the Illinois Auditor General revealed that IDES overpaid more than $5 billion. In an Aug. 9 Facebook post, Sen. Terri Bryant responded.

"Remember the pandemic shutdown where businesses were forced to close, leaving thousands of Illinoisans out of work?" Bryant said on the social media platform. "Then, remember when those same people were left to navigate a chaotic unemployment system, waiting weeks and months for their benefits…let alone even a phone call back from IDES?

"This, all while money was being handed out left and right to fraudsters. Well, fast forward to now, 3.5 years later, when we’re finally getting to see the full picture of what took place."

During the COVID pandemic, unemployment claims grew exponentially. To keep up, the Pritzker administration suspended many of its fraud prevention tools. As a result, more than 10,000 payments were sent to nearly 5000 people who were dead, totaling $6 million. Another 92,000 payments were sent to more than 3,000 people in jail, totaling $40 million.

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 individuals’ self-certification was accurate.

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

On July 26, Bryant issued a news release with her immediate statement: “The details contained in this IDES audit are without a question sickening. In an effort to fast-track claims, Illinois awarded millions of dollars to a company in a no-bid contract just for IDES to disable routine identity cross-matches meant to prevent fraud within the system we paid for. This ill-conceived decision helped fraudsters to steal billions of dollars of unemployed benefits while hardworking Illinoisians facing economic uncertainty created by the Pritzker Administration’s lockdown were forced to spend countless hours trying to access the benefits they rightfully deserved. The mismanagement and poor decisions made by IDES are disgraceful to say the very least. The people of our state deserve accountability. Unfortunately, I do not have confidence we will see any accountability from this Administration."