Mayor Emanuel halts mileage, travel reimbursements, orders review - Chicago Sun-Times

Two days before he has to decide whether to fire 54 Chicago firefighters accused of padding mileage expenses, Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered an overhaul Monday of the city's travel and mileage reimbursement policies — and suspended all payments until that's done..

The Chicago Sun-Times reported last month that city Inspector General Joe Ferguson has recommended firing the 54 firefighters — half the staff of the Fire Prevention Bureau — for allegedly falsifying mileage used to reimburse them for driving their personal vehicles to inspections.

The alleged fraud cost Chicago taxpayers more than $100,000 in 2009 alone, Ferguson found, but has been going on for years. Several of the accused firefighters allegedly acknowledged padding mileage expenses after being confronted with evidence from GPS-equipped cell phones that have tracked their movements since a 2007 scandal.

In 2009, the firefighters were reimbursed at the IRS rate of 55 cents a mile. The worst offenders allegedly worked backward from an unspecified monthly cap and falsified their mileage to justify claiming the maximum.

Wednesday is the deadline for Emanuel to either fire the 54 firefighters or publicly explain why not.

That makes the timing of Monday's overhaul no coincidence.

It could be that the mayor intends to use the broader review by City Comptroller Amer Ahmad to justify a punishment short of termination or, at the very least, a delay in making that decision.

Last month, Emanuel appeared to tip his hand. He vowed to root out the "systemic, cultural" problem that has caused constant corruption in the Fire Prevention Bureau, but he argued that it's not as simple as terminating the 54 firefighters.

"I don't want to just say, `These people are responsible' because there's a culture if you have a repetitive problem," he said then. "That is what I want to get to."

At the time, Emanuel argued that he was "caught between a rock and a hard place."

In a "perfect, ideal world," he said, he could fire the 54 firefighters accused of padding their mileage expenses and excise the problem. But a grievance process would allow the fired firefighters to challenge their firings.

"If …all 54 got fired for the collective $100,000 in mistakes, through that process, that takes close to 10 months," Emanuel said. "You could end up costing us more than the $100,000 of the original violation.

"That where we're caught…. This is a classic of getting caught between a rock and a hard place…I've talked to the commissioner about dealing with this systemically, culturally and then, if we need to, on a personnel basis."

The mayor has asked Ahmad to review past travel expenditures and to compare travel and mileage reimbursement policies in city departments and local government agencies to those in the private sector. The study is expected to result in a "singular, uniform" policy to make certain that public money is spent only for "critical operations that require transportation."

Two months ago, Emanuel cut from 500 to just 30 the number of credit cards used by local government agencies—and banned the use of petty cash altogether—after alleged abuses that ousted the chiefs of the CHA and Chicago Park District.

The changes followed a review by Ahmad with pro-bono help from Sidley Austin LLP and the Civic Consulting Alliance.

12 Sep, 2011

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