OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
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September 2017
866-IG-T1PLINE (866-448-4754)
Joseph M. Ferguson Inspector General
OFFICE OF INSPECTOR GENERAL
City of Chicago
740 N. Sedgwick Street, Suite 200 Chicago, Illinois 60654 Telephone: (773) 478-7700 Fax: (773) 478-3949
September 20, 2017
To the Mayor, Members of the City Council, City Clerk, City Treasurer, and residents of the City of Chicago:
The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General (OIG) has completed an audit of the City's compliance with the Language Access Ordinance, Municipal Code of Chicago Chapter 2-40 (Ordinance). The Ordinance requires City departments to create and implement plans to provide persons with limited English proficiency meaningful access to vital documents and services. We conducted this audit with the cooperation of the Mayor's Office of New Americans (ONA), which assists departments in complying with the Ordinance.
Based on the audit results, OIG concluded that the City is not in compliance with the requirements of the Language Access Ordinance. Specifically, ONA has focused its efforts on the seven City departments it deems fully subject to the legal requirements, and has not ensured that the other departments have complied with the Ordinance's mandate to implement those requirements "to the degree practicable." Moreover, none of the seven prioritized departments are in full compliance. OIG thus makes a number of recommendations, including that the Mayor's Office both clarify which requirements of the Ordinance apply to each of the various City departments, and endow ONA or another entity with the power and duty to enforce compliance with the language access requirements, as other cities have done with their own comparable ordinances. In its response, ONA committed to continue to work closely with the seven prioritized departments and to initiate quarterly meetings to evaluate language a...
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