Outgoing Comptroller Dan Hynes will reportedly join Foster & Foster
Consulting Actuaries, a Florida-based company that advises the management
of public and union pensions, when he leaves office next week. Hynes
referred to the job as a "natural transition."
That's how much the state of Illinois owed, as of July 1, in back payments to schools, municipalities, and social service providers. Comptroller Dan Hynes' latest quarterly report (PDF) shows that to pay off its obligations this year, the General Assembly would need to divert 23 percent of its FY 2011 revenues.
Barring a legislative miracle, next
year could be even worse. Revenues are barely increasing. In just the
first three months of the current fiscal year, Illinois has amassed a
total of $3.5 billion in unpaid bills. That means $8 billion in late payments could carry over into FY 2012, which begins next July. It's an ugly problem without an easy solution.
Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes says that a tax amnesty program designed to allow residents to pay back taxes without penalty hasn't yet proved
the boon to the state's balance sheet as hoped. In fact, Hynes' office
has lowered its initial estimate for how much revenue the program will
generate.
At Wednesday's gubernatorial debate,
GOP nominee Bill Brady made an odd claim. The Republican
said the state doesn't know which social service providers it owes
money to. Watch it:
The Tribune's Eric Zorn followed up
on this. The comptroller's office reported Thursday afternoon that
there are 204,688 unpaid vouchers worth $5.4 billion sitting on Dan
Hynes' desk. "We know with great specificity what is owed and to whom," Hynes' spokesman Alan Henry told the Tribune. "Anybody who wants to know who we owe money to from the bills in our office simply has to request the information."
To
be fair, neither candidate has offered a concrete plan to pay off this
debt. But suggesting that the payment records don't exist is another
"airy and insubstantial" attack from a candidate Zorn calls "Sen. Cotton
Candy." "Bite into his finely spun rhetoric," he adds, "and there's
almost nothing there." Read his full column here.
UPDATE (3:03 p.m.): Archpundit has more on the topic here.
Illinois' unpaid bills will likely grow by $1 billion within the next three months according to a quarterly report issued today by Comptroller Dan Hynes.
Over the years, we've written a lot about the need for better tax increment financing (TIF) oversight and transparency in the City of Chicago. Maybe it's time this effort extended to the state as a whole.
Today, SouthtownStar columnist Phil Kadner notes that a TIF lawyer stole between $1 million and $3 million from a district in south suburban Calumet Park. For years, he overcharged the municipality for legal work that wasn't even being done. All the while, he neglected to send state-mandated annual financial reports for the district to Comptroller Dan Hynes, who repeatedly notified Calumet Park of the failure to comply, but never took further action. When confronted, a spokesperson for the comptroller said the office's only responsibility is to "collect the reports." Kadner's response: "So you need a law telling the comptroller to notify the attorney
general when a municipality fails to file reports for nine years? How about using some common sense?" Read the whole piece here.
