IRONMAN FIREMAN

BLIZZARD

OEMC INVESTIGATIONS

An IGO investigation determined that three Office of Emergency Management & Communications

(OEMC) Foremen of Linemen falsified their mileage reimbursement requests.5 Thirteen
surveillances of Foreman A‟s personal vehicle, 8 surveillances of Foreman B‟s personal vehicle,
and 3 surveillances of the Foreman C‟s personal vehicle were conducted while parked at their 1345
W. Madison Avenue work location.
The investigation found that on 11 of the 13 surveillance days (or 85% of the time), Foreman A

falsified his mileage reimbursement entries by claiming he drove a total of 388 miles in his car
during his work hours when surveillance established that his car never moved. Based on the false
entries for those surveillance days, Foreman A improperly claimed and received a total of $226 in
mileage reimbursement payments from the City.
The investigation also found that on 7 of 8 surveillance days (or 87% of the time), Foreman B

falsified his mileage reimbursement entries by claiming he drove a total of 243 miles in his
personal car during work hours when surveillance established in fact that his car never moved.
Based on the false entries for those surveillance days, Foreman B improperly claimed and received
a total of $139 in mileage reimbursement from the City.
Lastly, the investigation found that on 3 of 4 surveillance days, Foreman C falsified his mileage
reimbursement entries by claiming he drove a total of 101 miles in his personal car during work
hours when surveillance established his car never moved. Based on the false entries for those
surveillance days, Foreman C improperly claimed and received a total of $59 in mileage
reimbursement....
The IGO also conducted surveillance of the General Foreman of Lineman who supervised Foreman

of Linemen A, B and C.6 Surveillance observed the General Foreman swiping in for work at a fire
station near his residence on eight of twelve days, and at a police station near his residence on a
ninth day. This conduct violated OEMC‟s time-keeping policy requiring employees to swipe in at
their assigned location. By not swiping at his assigned location, the General Foreman falsely
indicated to the City that he/she was at work when he/she was not. In addition, after one of the
improper fire station swipes, surveillance observed the General Foreman return to his residence and
remain there for 55 minutes while on the clock....
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An IGO investigation determined that in an attempt to get out of a parking ticket, an OEMC

employee told multiple police officers that she worked for the Chicago Police Department‟s
Internal Affairs Division (IAD). After observing a CPD Officer write a parking ticket for
illegally parking in a bus stop, the OEMC employee pursued the ticketing officer, claiming that
she worked at IAD, and that she wanted the ticket “taken care of.” In so doing, the OEMC
employee showed the CPD Officer her City of Chicago identification card. The OEMC
employee then called the CPD Officer‟s supervisor, maintaining to that supervisor and others
that she was an IAD employee during several transfers of her call before being able to speak with
a Lieutenant.
The Lieutenant reviewed the circumstances surrounding the ticket, and determined that the

citation was not issued in error. When looking for the OEMC employee‟s contact information on
the CPD database in order to return the ticket to her, the Lieutenant discovered that the OEMC
employee worked for OEMC, not IAD. When the IGO confronted the OEMC employee about
the incident, she admitted to misrepresenting her employment to the CPD and admitted that she
asked the parking ticket to be “taken care of.”
The IGO recommended that the OEMC employee be discharged for violating the City Personnel
Rule that bars “having other City employees perform services or directing other city employees
to perform services for unauthorized purposes.”
OEMC agreed, and termination proceedings have been initiated.

Read the report here

AUDIT

April 7, 2011

To the Mayor, Members of the City Council, the City Clerk, the City Treasurer, and the residents
of the City of Chicago:
The Inspector General's Office ("I GO") performed an audit of payments disbursed by the Office
of Emergency Management and Communications ("OEMC") from January 1, 2008 to September
30, 2009. The purpose of the audit was to review, test, and evaluate procedures related to
payment disbursements and contract management to determine whether OEMC had effective and
efficient operations and internal controls, as well as adequate policies and procedures in place.
Based upon the results of our audit, we determined that internal controls were not adequate to
prevent waste and misconduct and, therefore, resulted in substandard disbursement and contract
management processes.
More specifically, the audit found deficiencies in internal controls resulting in the following
negative consequences:
• Voucher Manipulation: OEMC's non-payroll disbursements between January 1,2008 and
September 30, 2009 totaled $72,880,188. The sample reviewed during the audit included
$38,633,405, or 53% of the total amount disbursed. We found that at least $13,678,786,
which equates to an extraordinarily high 35% of the commodities purchased in the
sample, did not match the goods and services of the original invoices and/or that the
actual commodities purchased were not related to the contracts from which they were
paid.
• Missing Inventory: During the review of vouchers, we identified a sample of goods
received totaling $134,583. We met with OEMC representatives to validate the existence
of these goods. Of the sample, 38 laserjet printers, 10 computer carrying cases, seven
notebook computers and a digital camera could not be located. These missing goods
were valued at $19,001, or 15% of the sample.
• Common Law Employees: During the audit period, the auditors identified 50 individuals
contracted through seven different vendors who were identified as
contractors/consultants. Based upon initial discussions with OEMC personnel, the
auditors suspected some of these contractors/consultants to be common law employees in
violation of the Shakman Accord. A parallel IGO disciplinary investigation focused on
one of the seven vendors and subsequently determined that eleven of the
contractors/consultants associated with that one vendor alone were, in fact, common law
employees. The investigative findings essentially substantiated the existence of the
preliminarily identified by the Ioo auditors.
During performance of Ioo audit fieldwork, OEMC began formulating and implementing policy
and procedural changes responsive to the broad scale, systemic deficiencies revealed by the
audit. Accordingly, the !GO credits OEMC officials with acknowledging the audit findings and
promptly moving to address them through remedial measures, the nature and effectiveness of
which we will evaluate in a future public follow-up report.


Respectfully,
Joseph M. Ferguson
Inspector General
City of Chicago
 
Read the report here

PRIVATIZATION

Is Privatization a Bad Deal for Cities and States?
To save money, New York is turning the clock back on outsourcing by replacing private contractors with city workers.

Outsourcing the Wrong Jobs
Updated April 4, 2011, 10:00 AM

John "Jack" Donahue, a former assistant secretary of labor, is the faculty chairman of Harvard University's Master in Public Policy program and the co-author of "Collaborative Governance: Private Roles for Public Goals in Turbulent Times."

Some things government should do itself. Some things it should outsource. The rules for smart contracting aren’t mysterious. Tasks that are well-defined, easy to monitor and available from competitive suppliers — call them “commodity tasks” — are prime candidates for privatization. Tasks that are complex and mutable, lack clear benchmarks or are immune from competition — “custom tasks” — should be kept in-house.

Governments often perversely outsource jobs that are hard to monitor, yet keep "commodity" jobs like clerical work..
In a perfect world, governments would delegate all the commodity tasks and none of the custom tasks. In the real world, of course, we should expect some jobs to end up in the wrong box. But the pattern should trend to logical sorting, or at worst a random scatter.

In fact, we do lots worse. Much commodity work remains in government — half a million construction jobs, 600,000 food-service workers and more than 3.5 million routine administrative and clerical jobs. Meanwhile, many tasks are outsourced even though they’re hard to monitor, entangled with an agency's overall mission or sheltered from market pressure. Agencies hire private firms to build and run their information technology, manage their personnel systems and craft strategy.

Why this pattern? Blame generation-scale tectonic shifts that opened gaps between public and private work. In the private sector, but not in government, the ceiling has blown off the pay distribution, and the floor has dropped out. Less-skilled workers cling to the public jobs that still pay middle-class wages. More-skilled workers shun government for greener private pastures. The gap at the top starves government of custom-task talent, forcing ill-advised outsourcing. The gap at the bottom means that outsourcing commodity tasks meets ferocious resistance.

Campaigns are underway to drive compensation for less-skilled public workers down to private-sector levels. But narrowing the lower gap addresses just one cause of perverse privatization. And nobody is calling to fix the gap at the top.
LINK HERE