Illinois Attorney General slams Orland Park for withholding critical information on unfiled annual audits
By Ray Hanania
In another major setback for Keith Pekau, the besieged MAYOR of Orland Park in suburban Chicagoland, the Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul ordered the village to release the correspondence between the village and its auditors.
The issue surfaced after this columnist in July reported exclusively that the Village of Orland Park had failed to file the required annual financial audits for 2022 and 2023. Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza then stepped in and ordered Pekau to file the annual audits or face a forced audit conducted by the state and the withholding of revenues.
Embarrassed by another public scandal, Pekau relented and quickly hired an auditor to complete a rushed audit of the 2022 finances. Many critics of the mayor’s sloppy financial management expressed concern that Pekau was hiding mounting debt and postpone announcement until after his re-election campaign and the village elections on April 1, 2025. Mendoza’s threat forced Pekau to acquience and complete one audit and begin the completing of the second unfiled delinquent audit for 2023. Trustee candidate Mohammed Jaber was the only pubic official to demand that Pekau suspend the creation of three planned Tax Increment Financing Districts (TIFs) until the delinquent audits could be filed so the taxpayers could get a better sense of the village’s rocky financial situation.
But, details in the forced 2022 audit raised more questions than provided answers and veteran investigator Michale Henry filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking copies of the correspondence between Pekau and the auditors to determine if there was any undue influence to manage the financial reporting to disguise debts or poor financial spending practices.
The village denied the request and Henry appealed, and the Illinois Attorney Generals issued a broad reprimand of Pekau and the village’s refusal to provide the documentation to verify the integrity of the forced 2022 audit concluding that the village “improperly responded” to Henry when they denied the release of the information.
After communicating back and forth with the village, the Illinois Attorney General’s office issued the following statement:
“All public records in the possession or custody of a public body are “presumed to be open to inspection or copying.” 5 ILCS 140/1.2 (West 2022); see also Southern Illinoisan v. Illinois Dep’t of Public Health, 218 Ill. 2d 390, 415 (2006). A public body “has the burden of proving by clear and convincing evidence” that a record is exempt from disclosure. 5 ILCS 140/1.2 (West 2022).”
The village argued that the documents were protected because they involved ani nternal audit of the delinquent annual reports.
But the Illinois Attorney General ruled against that false claim, writing:
“Despite the Village’s assertion that the records in question relate to internal audits, the Village hired an external auditor. The recently-completed Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for 2022 posted on the State Comptroller’s website includes a letter from the Village’s Finance Director stating that “Sikich CPA LLC, a firm of independent certified public accountants[ ]” performed an “independent audit. The “Independent Auditor’s Report” prepared by the external auditor notes that “[w]e are required to be independent of the Village and to meet our other ethical responsibilities in accordance with the relevant ethical requirements relating to our audit.”7 Such an audit is not an “internal audit” under the plain language of the definition of that term. Accordingly, this office concludes that the Village has not sustained its burden of demonstrating that the records are exempt from disclosure pursuant to section 7(1)(m) of FOIA.”
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CLICK HERE TO READ THE Op-Ed column: Pekau deceives public about his bullying at board meetings. Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau continues with his lies and exaggerations about his critics, just as he also lies about the village’s finances, claiming he’s not responsible for the mounting debt burden
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Once again, Pekau has been embarrassed because of his missteps as the village executive and in denying public information.
Since taking control of the board with his rubber stamp board six years ago, Pekau has acted to pull the curtain on public accountability, undermining transparency and limiting the ability of Orland Park taxpayers from engaging in meaningful dialogue over proposed policies and actions. Pekau did that by eliminating all of the public committee and consolidating them into one “Committee of the Whole” (COW) which convenes twice each month just prior to the two village board meetings which are held on the first and third Monday’s of each month.
The COW limits public participation in the villages decisions, undermines the rights of taxpayers to question the actions of the mayor and the board, and creates a fog that disguises and veils the villages actions making it more difficult to understand how the village spends taxpayer collected funds.
Click here to read the entire letter from the Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul to Michael Henry and to the Village of Orland Park.
Ray Hanania is an award winning former Chicago City Hall reporter who has lived in Orland Park since 1986. He writes for many suburban Chicagoland newspapers including The Regional News, and iis the Senior US COrrespondet for Arab News Newspaper, the leading English Language newspaper in the Middle East. For more information on this and other topics, or to get information on subscribing to his columns and video podcasts below, visit his website at hanania.com. You can Email Ray at rghanania@gmail.com.
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