Hello?

Twell Paxton, Inspector General.

Ready.

Okay.

Good afternoon.

Or early evening.

Chairman Daly and members of the Board of Commissioners.

Pursuant to Cook County ordinance, the mission of the Office of the Independent Inspector General is to detect, deter, and prevent public corruption, fraud, waste, mismanagement, unlawful political discrimination, and other forms of misconduct in the operation of Cook County government.

The jurisdiction of the OIG includes all offices under the Cook County Board President, the Cook County Board of Commissioners, Cook County Health and Forest Preserves, and the separately elected Cook County officials, such as the Assessor, Treasurer, Clerk, Sheriff, and Board of Review.

Pursuant to State Statute, our office also has jurisdiction over other government officials who are appointed by the Cook County Board or the President, such as trustees of local sanitary districts and mosquito abatement districts.

The OIG is budgeted for 25 full-time employees, which includes the Inspector General, two Deputy Inspectors General, one General Counsel, one Assistant Inspector General, one office manager, one administrative assistant, and 18 investigators.

Last year we had 14 positions filled.

Currently, we have 20 positions filled.

As you may recall, we were budgeted for five new positions last year.

However, we could not fill them until mid-year.

We have started the hiring process and plan to fill the remaining positions by the end of August.

Based on May figures, we are under budget by 468,350, or 27.3 percent for the six-month period and fiscal year 2026.

We are under budget primarily due to open positions not related to the additional five positions.

There are also unspent costs associated with the upcoming office relocation in the fourth quarter.

We expect to stay within our budget for the remaining portion of fiscal year 2026.

Looking forward, we seek to further expand our office during fiscal year 2027 to include five additional staff to address the long-standing personnel shortages.

These new positions will assist in unlawful political discrimination, sexual harassment and workplace misconduct, contract compliance and performance, property tax fraud and wrong assessments, and waste and mismanagement.

The OIG still believes an OIG budgetary floor should be considered and eventually implemented.

As you know, we have proposed an amendment to the Office of the Independent Inspector General ordinance to address issues related to staffing and independence from political influence.

This year has already demonstrated the growing demand for our oversight.

In the first two quarters, complaints have increased by 25 percent, and we have completed 60 investigations, more than the total number completed in all of 2025.

This pace reflects rising public trust and productivity in the Inspector General's office.

Unfortunately, we are seeing troubling spikes in property tax issues.

These trends underscore the need for vigilant, timely intervention.

Additionally, we reviewed the property tax system implementation project and found breakdowns in oversight planning and vendor efficiency.

With the appropriate staffing levels, we can curb errors, omissions, fraud, waste, and mismanagement earlier and more effectively.

We are also experiencing an increase in the volume of complaints related to sexual harassment and workplace misconduct.

Although most of these complaints are non-sustained and closed, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to triage, assign, and determine whether there is any merit to the allegations.

Today, we released a public report on Cook County Health's revenue cycle.

As you may recall, our prior reviews found that CCH lost more than $115 million in 2018 alone due to claim denials from waste and mismanagement.

Following our recommendations, CCH strengthened its processes and added staff to address the underlying issues.

As a result, claim denials have dropped significantly in the cost savings generated since 2020, are now projected to exceed $500 million.

I want to publicly commend CCH's staff for this remarkable turnaround.

They exemplify how dedicated county employees can resolve complex challenges and deliver meaningful results for county stakeholders.

Lastly, I want to thank those who continue to support our office and assist us in reaching our mission.

At this time, I can take any questions you may have for me.

Commissioner Laura.

Thank you, Chairman, and thank you, General.

First, I'd like to also say thanks for uh the CCH revenue cycle report.

Thank you for shining a light on that.

And you're absolutely right.

It shows that um with communication and collaboration, we can do a whole lot.

And uh I really appreciate your leadership and the leadership of your office.

Public trust is a pillar of democracy.

And you more than anyone that I've seen within these walls, you maintain that and you make sure that all of us do the same.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, and thank you uh for being here and for the office for doing all the work that you do.

So um I know that we uh talked a little bit about your case management system and how that will be improved over time.

Do you have an update about when it will be finished?

Hi, uh Jennifer Fother, the OIAG office manager.

Um, yes, there was delays that were experienced uh last winter.

Um we ended up having a delay based on trying to decide if we were going to stay on premise, which meant that our system would be hosted on the county servers or use the vendors cloud-based service.

Uh so BOT did an analysis on us for that.

Uh we finally decided to stay on premise based on cost and just the ability for us to manage our own systems and you know make sure safety um and confidentiality was maintained, so we decided to stay on premise.

Um we have weekly meetings with BOT and the vendor now, and we are on track to be fully up to date with our system by September.

Okay, and then how much additional will that cost out of your budget this year?

No additional.

They are turning on additional functionalities that are more expensive.

No.

They honored the price that they quoted us.

Sounds great.

Okay.

Um so you had noted that your office is in the process of hiring additional staff to address some procurement matters and personnel management.

What really sparked your interest in adding that staff for those matters specifically?

So the the hiring process is for the five positions that the board approved last year.

We're seeking five additional ones for 2027.

Okay.

But is it specific to procurement matters?

They're definitely included in those.

As you know, there was a major report issued yesterday.

Yeah, I'm getting to the Tyler, I mean the contractor.

I didn't say Tyler, so when it's contractor A report.

Okay.

So I read that report more than once.

Um, and the contractor A findings that you have in there really point to a number of you know, failures that were across multiple systems.

So you had some recommendations in there.

And so because procurement is so big, we are such a big county.

Um, would one of those uh the findings, I guess, really triangulate between the ability for procurement to see when a contract is going sideways along with the agency who also sees that it's going sideways and have kind of the ability to kind of more closely communicate.

Because the way it really happens now, excuse me, is you know, the whoever the using agency is is trying to maintain that contract, trying to maintain that work being done, a project, the program, the construction, whatever it is, at the same time doing all the other work that they're supposed to do.

And the procurement has moved on from that, not entirely because they still, you know, have some interest in making sure that it works well, but really has moved on to the other procurement items.

So, would it be a good idea based on what you saw in that report that was issued yesterday for there to be more consistent communication between procurement who who went through that process and then the using agency who is using it so that if procurement has to do letters or notices to cure and they have to communicate back about what the obligations and responsibilities are, that it happens more swiftly.

Absolutely.

Um that particular case, it was a bigger challenge because you had the independently uh operating offices, right?

You had so many individuals.

I don't mean to distill the problems down to just procurement and um you know the using agency.

I'm just going forward from lessons learned.

The my concern isn't just the negatives that came out of that, but also just how to move forward to make sure that that does not happen again.

And I do think that in those cases, um our office should get involved because I mean BOT was there.

You had um I think a lot of individuals knew kind of knew what was going on, but they tried to work through it.

So sometimes it's best to have an independent voice that's going to be objective, go in and kind of sort things out without getting being disruptive.

But I think in that particular case, it did look like there had to be one primary authority, and then splitting it up and saying everybody's responsible for their parts never works.

If you have a board full of people and they're just all have an equal voice, nothing ever works.

You need one person in that room to say, I've looked at everything and this is the decision that we've made and move forward with that decision with the buy-in, with the input, with the expertise of everybody else.

But at the end of the day, if there is one BOT and it is the county's BOT, and that is the one agency where everybody else has said, okay, well, we agree that there's one expertise, and we're not gonna all have individual BOTs, but we're really gonna lean into one, then they need to be given the authority to really move forward, make decisions, be staffed up and execute because otherwise you have all these separately elected, other people that are doing other jobs, and then for these bigger projects, I could just see things going off the rails time and time again.

The county needs to be invested in data.

Governments are not great at collecting data, we're not great at maintaining that data, but that is the way of the future.

So I think we need to improve it, but that means we need a strong BOT.

We need leadership from that BOT, but we need the buy-in from all these separately electeds to say we trust you, and that that BOT is then given that authority to move it, move it forward.

Well that would be a major um, I want to say statutory ordinance challenge to have BOT able to make the elected of separately elected officials actually do something to give them that jurisdiction.

How do you that's why I'm saying with our office, we have jurisdiction over all of those different offices.

I'm not trying to oversimplify this in any way.

I'm not trying to say that would be an easy up, you know, uplifting it all and getting that trust to be there.

It just seems that right now that trust isn't there.

So working to get it to repair and to move forward to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Just um for him to get involved in disputes.

He has to come in at the end.

You had indicated it would have been better coming in early.

I I don't know how you would have gotten that can't happen under the through litigation if anything, Chairman.

We we actually have uh gotten involved um with a number of contracts.

But we we wait until there's time.

There needs to be time for things to play to play out.

Um that is your role yes, right?

Well, we also have like a county auditor and the auditor also could be pulled in and more of a front-end kind of thing to say, hey, how are we doing and kind of be a neutral party?

Yes.

But I do think it will require a strong BOT and it will require an auditor to say this is this is 30 days and it already looks like it's going sideways.

So let's make sure that we're triaging something to support it.

But I really appreciate that report on the contractor A and the number of difficulties, and I think it's good to mind for information about how to avoid this in the future.

I will always say it also kind of dovetails back to that 10% procurement code update I had this month as kind of a you know, a bridge between financially incentivizing contractors to move forward in a way that's helpful for everybody.

But those um, all my questions, thank you very much for being here.

Okay.

Um I have no questions, but just want to thank you for your patience and your presentation.

I know you had to wait almost nearly two hours.

Um, so I just wanted to um, you know, thank you for for your patience and again for the information you've provided.

Um everything seemed pretty clear on my end.

So thank you.

Thank you.

No, Trevor.

Thank you, Verdi.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, and thank you for your work.

Um it's uh truly appreciate it.

Uh and I did only read through the the Tyler report once.

Um, and I uh I have to say that there was absolutely nothing in there that surprised me.

Um I come from uh uh uh background uh it in the in the corporate world, and I was an internal consultant in two of my my jobs for a total of about 11 years.

And the the sort of the scenario that you laid out there was something that is a well known in the business world, particularly in large corporations where you have multiple centers of power, and I was trained, went through a training process as an internal consultant, and part of that training process was in both both of my jobs.

Of course, that boils down to managing without authority, which is exactly the situation is that you have all these separately elected and you have to try and move a project forward, you know, without the the final power.

And um I know it's a complex problem.

I I know that it's not easily solved here, and it's not necessarily just handing it over to the to BOT.

And um, but it's a it's something that uh not just with Tyler, but I think any large tech project that we have, or any large project we have that that requires this kind of coordination.

It's a problem we need to recognize and find some way of solving.

And I don't know whether your office is is can take the lead or can only do the post-mortem.

Um but uh I you know kind of want to use this as a chance to say to folks that yes, this is a problem that we need to solve um either as a board as a collectively as a county government going forward.

Uh you know, we can't afford another Tyler, so thank you.

Welcome.

Commissioner Stanks, another question.

Yeah, thank you.

And I know each eight uh every quarter you submit your your uh report to the uh litigation committee, and um hopefully the departments are following up here.

Thank you.

I know you did have have done a numerous uh reports, and you've turned them over to the various uh law enforcement, correct?

Correct.

Do we have a total on those?

Yes, um, as of second quarter, we've completed we have issued 300, not 300, 136 completed investigation reports amounting to over three million dollars in federal fraud.

All cases do get referred to law enforcement.

They have been and there has been any action on any of them.

Unfortunately, not okay.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioners, thank you again for your long day.

This committee will stand in recess to the hour of 9 a.m.

tomorrow.

We're gonna have the treasury the assessory states that you