Illinois Prisons Paid $151.7 Million in Overtime in One Year
Summary
A state compliance audit found Illinois's Department of Corrections paid $151.7 million in overtime and another $39.2 million in compensatory time in fiscal year 2024 -- and when auditors sampled the 20 employees with the most overtime, 16 of them had also billed a full day of paid leave on a day they worked overtime. The department could not produce a single union agreement that allows the practice. The same pattern was first flagged in a 2014 audit; ten years and five audit cycles later, it is still unresolved.
A decade of the same finding, unresolved
This is not a new discovery. The audit notes the same finding -- "Taking paid leave time and working overtime on the same day" -- was first raised in the department's Fiscal Year 2014 compliance examination, and has now been repeated across five audit cycles without correction. A companion finding fares no better: the department has run its timekeeping on paper since at least 1998, a manual system covering 11,670 employees as of FY2024, twenty-six years after auditors first flagged the lack of automation as a control risk that makes exactly this kind of abuse hard to catch.
View data as table
| Stateville Correctional Center | 21,829,406 | 393,832 hours -- the highest of any facility |
|---|---|---|
| Dixon Correctional Center | 10,977,269 | 210,329 hours -- second-highest |
| Rest of the department | 118,927,424 | The other ~28 facilities combined (computed residual, not itemized by name in the audit) |
Two prisons, and a second pot of money
Overtime wasn't evenly spread. Stateville Correctional Center alone accounted for $21.8 million of the department's overtime bill -- more than any other facility -- followed by Dixon Correctional Center at $11.0 million, which is why auditors drew their sample from those two. Capitol News Illinois reported⧉ the department's FY2024 budget at roughly $2.1 billion, which puts the $151.7 million overtime bill at about 7% of everything the state spent running its prisons that year.
The overtime finding isn't the only place the same pattern shows up. A separate finding on compensatory ("comp") time -- hours banked instead of paid out, then cashed in later -- found the department paid $39.2 million for 951,129 hours of comp time in FY2024, more than double both the hours and the cost of two years earlier. Federal law caps public-safety employees at 480 hours of accrued comp time; when auditors sampled 20 employees at Stateville and Menard Correctional Centers, 2 had been allowed to exceed that cap by as much as 688.5 hours in a single month. That finding, too, was first raised in 2014.
View data as table
| Stateville Correctional Center | 4,026,403 | 92,098 hours -- the highest of any facility |
|---|---|---|
| Menard Correctional Center | 3,409,070 | 84,180 hours -- second-highest |
| Rest of the department | 31,720,626 | The other facilities combined (computed residual, not itemized by name in the audit) |
- Illinois prisons paid $151.7 million in overtime in fiscal year 2024 -- about 7% of the department's roughly $2.1 billion budget -- plus another $39.2 million in compensatory time, for $190.9 million in premium pay combined.
- Auditors sampled the 20 employees paid the most overtime and found 16 (80%) had billed a full paid day off and worked an overtime shift on that same day at least once; the department could not produce a union agreement permitting it.
- Stateville and Dixon Correctional Centers led the department in overtime cost ($21.8 million and $11.0 million); Stateville and Menard led in compensatory-time cost ($4.0 million and $3.4 million).
- The same-day leave-plus-overtime pattern was first flagged in the Fiscal Year 2014 audit and remains unresolved five audit cycles later; the department's lack of an automated timekeeping system is an even older unresolved finding, first flagged in 1998.
All figures come from the Illinois Auditor General's State Compliance Examination of the Department of Corrections for the two years ended June 30, 2024 (accountant's report dated August 1, 2025), prepared by Adelfia CPAs as Special Assistant Auditors, plus Capitol News Illinois's reporting on the department's roughly $2.1 billion FY2024 budget. This piece independently recomputed the combined overtime-plus-comp-time total ($190,890,198), overtime's share of the reported department budget (about 7.2%), the per-employee overtime average ($13,002, a department-wide figure -- overtime is concentrated at high-vacancy facilities, not spread evenly), and the residual overtime and comp-time cost outside the two named facilities in each chart; all reproduce or are directly derived from the audit's own figures. The department's official responses to both findings, included in the audit, state that staff shortages and competing scheduling priorities drive the practice; the department did not dispute the underlying figures.
Sources(2) ▾
- Office of the Auditor General, State of Illinois (Adelfia CPAs, Special Assistant Auditors), State of Illinois, Department of Corrections: State Compliance Examination, For the Two Years Ended June 30, 2024 (2025-08-01) — The primary document: Illinois's statutory State Compliance Examination of the Department of Corrections, prepared under Government Auditing Standards by Adelfia CPAs as Special Assistant Auditors to the elected Auditor General. Source for every overtime, compensatory-time, timekeeping, and repeat-finding figure in this piece, plus the Department's own written responses. auditor.illinois.gov · original document
- Capitol News Illinois, Illinois lawmakers grill Department of Corrections after audit shows dozens of failures (2026-04-14) — Secondary journalism, used for the Department's approximate $2.1 billion FY2024 budget (not stated in the audit itself, needed to size the overtime figure) and for legislators' on-the-record reactions at the April 14, 2026 Senate/House hearing on the audit. capitolnewsillinois.com · original document
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Illinois's Department of Corrections paid $151.7 million in overtime in fiscal year 2024, according to a state compliance examination⧉ issued by the Illinois Auditor General's office. When auditors pulled the timesheets of the 20 employees who had been paid the most overtime -- 10 each at Stateville and Dixon Correctional Centers -- 16 of them (80%) had, on at least one occasion, used a full paid day off and then worked another shift at time-and-a-half on that same day. Across the sample, auditors counted 150 such instances over two fiscal years. Asked to produce a union agreement that permitted the practice, the department could not.