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City Paid Tens of Millions in Overtime to Potentially Ineligible Employees, OIG Finds
The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) has published an advisory sent to the Department of Human Resources (DHR) and the Department of Finance (DOF) alerting them that from 2020 through 2024, the City paid $26.5 million in overtime to potentially ineligible employees.
OIG’s determination was based on City employees’ Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) status, as determined by DHR, and relevant labor unions’ collective bargaining agreements. From January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2024, the City of Chicago paid $26.5 million in overtime pay to 1,072 employees even though those employees may not have been entitled to such pay.
The City paid this overtime to employees in 24 City departments, the Board of Elections, the Office of the City Clerk, and City Council. Additionally, OIG identified 18 employees who were each paid between $250,000 and $700,000 in overtime during the period of review, accounting among them for 24.6% of the overtime paid to potentially ineligible employees.
“OIG’s analysis revealed tens of millions of misspent dollars. We advised DHR and DOF of our findings in November 2025, in the hopes that they might inform the City’s 2026 budget process,” said Deborah Witzburg, Inspector General for the City of Chicago.
“Both DHR and DOF largely concurred with OIG’s determination and made thoughtful commitments to improving operations. I want to both recognize that and to underscore the scale of the problem; the City’s finances are, needless to say, in an extremely precarious place, and we can ill-afford mistakes which run well into the eight figures.”
In its response to OIG’s advisory, DHR and DOF acknowledged the need for “additional steps” to prevent overtime payments to ineligible employees. They identified corrective actions in pursuit of that goal and committed to collaborate with each other in order “to implement measures to ensure the City is not paying overtime to ineligible employees.”
Read the Report
Read the full report, released on January 21, 2026.
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Hanania also writes about Middle East issues for the Arab News, and The Arab Daily News criticizing government policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hanania was named "Best Ethnic American Columnist" by the New America Media in November 2007, and is the 2009 recipient of the SPJ National Sigma Delta Chi Award for column writing.
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