ILL-inois: Draft audit finds Quinn's anti-violence slush fund program was worse than believed

In case you didn't know, violence is way up in Chicago.

And Illinois is broke.

The failed anti-violence program, the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative, was unveiled in the fall of 2010 when Pat Quinn, who succeeded Rod Blagojevich as governor, was in a tough election battle to win a four year term.

From the Chicago Tribune:

In his unsuccessful 2014 bid for re-election, then-Gov. Pat Quinn vowed that sweeping changes had cleaned up an unwieldy anti-violence program, but new findings show that widespread problems persisted for two years longer than previously known.

The findings emerged in a "confidential draft" the Tribune obtained of a new, highly critical audit — nearing release — that focuses on a high-profile issue in the last gubernatorial election.

According to the draft, the state auditor general's office found that bread-and-butter grant protocol was abandoned, leading to sketchy oversight riddled with missing documentation, questionable spending, unclear results and unspent money yet to be returned to state coffers. In one case, auditors discovered, a private agency filed for bankruptcy less than four months after getting more than $583,000 in state money.

The draft also said a top Quinn aide directed which community groups would get taxpayer money rather than putting contracts up for bids. That was independently confirmed by the man who headed the agency that administered the grants, the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority. Neither auditors nor the agency were given any evidence to explain why those groups were the best ones to choose.

NRI was nothing more than a political slush fund.