Illinois’s Legislative Audit Commission refused Tuesday to accept a state Department of Corrections audit that found 40 failures — including a decade-old overtime scheme that cost the state $150 million in fiscal year 2024 — and ordered the agency to return with answers on its remediation progress.
The bipartisan commission, which reviews audits of state agencies, questioned Corrections Director LaToya Hughes over findings that auditors said had persisted in some cases since 2014 despite repeated departmental commitments to address them. Hughes took over as director in 2023 and was confirmed by the Senate the month after the audit was released.
“There is literally nothing that you guys can say that I would believe,” commission co-chair Sen. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, said. “And honestly, it’s about the safety of people in the state and the safety of the men and women that work there.”
The audit, covering fiscal years 2023 and 2024 and released in September, cited overtime manipulation, improper emergency purchasing, and failures to supervise parolees — including sex offenders on mandatory supervised release — as problems the department has not resolved over multiple budget cycles on a $2.1 billion annual budget.
Overtime abuse
Auditors found that 80 percent of the department employees they reviewed had recorded overtime on the same days they also received paid leave. Under the arrangement, an employee could take a full week of paid vacation, come into work for a partial shift, and have those hours counted as overtime rather than regular hours.
“Someone could take 37.5 hours, or 40 hours depending on what their schedule is, they could take a week’s vacation, they could come in and work a four-hour shift and that four hours would be paid in overtime even though they haven’t been in the office?” asked Rep. Amy Elik, R-Godfrey.
Hughes confirmed Elik’s description was accurate and attributed the practice to the department’s union contract. Auditors wrote that the problem has persisted since 2014 despite prior commitments from the department to fix it.
Overtime cost the state $150 million in fiscal year 2024. The department has also not digitized its timekeeping system. “The department at one point in time did attempt to digitize the timekeeping process,” Hughes said. “They were unable to do so at the time so that process is still a manual process.”
“We are being fleeced — the taxpayers,” Rose said. “You are putting people’s lives at risk.”
Emergency purchasing
Auditors found the department also resorted more frequently to the state’s emergency procurement process, which allows agencies to bypass the normal competitive bidding requirements.
The department spent millions on new vehicles through the emergency process in early 2023. DOC chief administrator Jared Brunk said the department’s regular vendor could not fulfill an order for vans through their existing contract, leading officials to designate the purchase as an emergency.
In mid-2023, the department also made a $692,640 emergency purchase for sliced bread — a product the department typically manufactures itself at Illinois River Correctional Center in Fulton County. Brunk said DOC encountered a supply chain issue and decided to purchase the bread instead.
“Isn’t it foreseeable that you need sliced bread to feed inmates?” Rose asked.
Public safety gaps
Separate audit findings raised concerns about public safety oversight. The department did not maintain a list of people on parole or mandatory supervised release who had become residents of facilities operated by other state departments, including public health, human services, and health care and family services.
State law requires the department to supervise sex offenders on mandatory supervised release and report to local police agencies on their compliance. Auditors found the department had failed to do so. More than 15,000 people are in DOC custody on parole or supervised release, according to auditors, and the department is required to notify local police when such a person lives in their community.
Auditors also found that some people in DOC custody were improperly labeled as violent sexual offenders despite not having committed such a crime. Assistant DOC Director Alyssa Williams said the errors stemmed from state’s attorneys and courts not providing sufficient information for the department to make accurate classifications.
“It’s sort of the ultimate irony that you’re housing people accused of violating the state law and then you guys are violating the state law,” Rose said.
Mail scanning
Department officials also briefed a separate legislative oversight committee on a rule allowing staff to scan and digitize incoming mail and books, adopted after a series of illegal substance exposures sent DOC staff to the hospital.
The department released its first data comparing drug incidents before and after the rule change. Total drug discoveries increased from 392 in the six months before the rule to 414 in the six months after. In-cell drug discoveries rose by nearly 40 incidents. Mail discoveries declined slightly, and alleged drug exposure incidents fell from 133 to 128.
Rep. Dave Vella, D-Rockford, said the numbers did not justify separating incarcerated people from their physical mail.
“The numbers just aren’t there to justify this amount of work and keeping the actual mail away from the people who are in custody,” Vella said.
DOC Chief Compliance Officer Michael Crum said the rule’s recent implementation could account for the trend, as contraband may have entered facilities before the rule took effect and been discovered afterward. He described the department’s approach as a “multifactored” effort with “mail being just one piece of it” and said visitor and staff searches were of “utmost importance.”
Jennifer Vollen-Katz, executive director of the John Howard Association, a prison reform advocacy organization, said the data confirmed critics’ concerns.
“This underscores what has been clear from the beginning, drugs mostly enter prisons through people who enter and exit the facilities and until more is done to crackdown on this the problem will persist,” Vollen-Katz said in a statement.
Because the commission declined to accept the audit’s findings, the Department of Corrections must return to answer further questions from lawmakers on its progress addressing the cited problems.