Politics
City Paid $26.5M in Overtime to Ineligible Employees: Watchdog
(WTTW News)
Chicago paid $26.5 million to more than 1,000 employees for working extra hours between 2020 and 2024, even though they were not eligible for overtime pay, according to a report released Wednesday by the city’s watchdog.
City officials have known for 12 years that ineligible employees were being paid overtime, but took no action to stop tens of millions of dollars from being misspent, Inspector General Deborah Witzburg told WTTW News.
“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,” Witzburg said in a statement.
The Office of the Inspector General informed leaders of the departments of Human Resources and Finance on Nov. 12 “in the hopes that they might inform the city’s 2026 budget process,” Witzburg said.
Despite several meetings focused on the budget during December, the inspector general’s finding that millions of dollars had been spent was never discussed publicly, and there is no evidence any members of the Chicago City Council were informed of the discovery.
Federal law requires most employees who work more than 40 hours during a seven-day period to be compensated at least one and one-half times their regular rate of pay.
However, most “executive, administrative and professional employees” are exempt from that requirement under federal law. Despite that, some city employees are covered by a collective bargaining agreement that requires the city to pay them overtime, according to Witzburg’s report.
The city of Chicago spent approximately $510.9 million on employee overtime in 2024, according to records obtained by WTTW News. More than half went to members of the Chicago Police Department, according to city data.
More than $6.3 million of that total was misspent, according to the inspector general’s report. That represented an increase of more than 8.4% over the amount of taxpayer money misspent on overtime in 2023, according to the report.
More than 54% of the misspent overtime pay went to members of the Chicago Fire Department, employees of the Office of Emergency Management Communications and CPD, according to the report.
Eighteen employees were each paid between $250,000 and $700,000 that they may not have been entitled to between 2020 and 2024, according to the report.
Leaders of the city’s Department of Human Resources first recognized the problem in 2010, according to the report.
The Office of the Inspector General first attempted to probe the issue in 2013, but was prevented from doing so because the city did not label which employees were, and were not, eligible to earn overtime pay, according to the report.
Contact Heather Cherone: @HeatherCherone | (773) 569-1863 | [email protected]
