City of Chicago Office of Inspector General
To the Mayor, City Council, City Clerk, City Treasurer, and Community Members of the City of Chicago:
Enclosed for your review is the public report on the operations of the City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) during the fourth quarter of 2022, filed with City Council pursuant to Section 2-56-120 of the Municipal Code of Chicago (MCC).
In the fourth quarter of 2022, the Office of Inspector General has continued its critical work as we grow and strengthen our organization. The work reported here reflects our ongoing efforts to conduct nimble, interdisciplinary oversight drawing on skill sets across OIG's practice areas.
Meanwhile, we look ahead in 2023. Despite a substantial budget reduction from last year, we have added new positions in our 2023 budget to shorten the timelines of our misconduct investigations and to provide devoted leadership to our data analytics and data transparency efforts. Our Public Safety and Audit & Program Review sections have each published plans for 2023, outlining dozens of potential projects and areas of inquiry.
Our view that the City of Chicago operates at a legitimacy deficit, and that we should direct our efforts to those areas where we can most effectively pay it down, continues to animate our work. We continue to focus on transparency in the City's operations, on police reform and public safety (reporting on our review of closed police misconduct investigations, including an investigation of a Chicago Police Department member alleged to belong to the Oath Keepers, begins on page 25), and on enforcing campaign finance and ethics rules (we discuss our new, proactive analysis of data on campaign contributions and our work to ensure accurate reporting of restricted campaign contributors on page 20).
Finally, as an outward reflection of our restructured intake process—built to ensure that OIG meets each problem presented to it with the best-suited oversight tool—we have la...
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