Illinois Valley Times

State Sen. Win Stoller (R-Peoria) knows how much pain all the deficiencies in the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) can mean for residents forced to deal with them.

“As a small business owner myself, I've seen first-hand the impact on our business community and the burden this crisis has placed on the business community,” Stoller said in a video posted to Facebook. “Here in my own company we have had multiple employees have their identities stolen and we've had to deal with this. As a good employer, we have tried to come alongside them and help them deal with this and navigate this with IDES."

Stoller joins other Republican lawmakers speaking out on the issue after a recent Illinois Auditor General report found shortcomings in the system. Stoller recently joined fellow Republican state Sens. Jason Plummer (R-Vandalia), Sue Rezin (R-Morris) and Dave Syverson (R-Rockford) in demanding that the last 13 months of IDES activity be thoroughly examined, fearing that the deficiencies he and others are now pointing to could leave already tapped-out taxpayers on the hook for another billion dollar tab.

Researchers say Pritzker and his administration failed to validate the identities of roughly 5,000 claimants before paying out somewhere in the neighborhood of $42,000,000 to them and paying out benefits to dozens of deceased individuals.

“When the governor ordered all IDES offices closed it was no place for people to go for help,” Stoller said. “If anyone was considered an essential worker, it should have been this department so they could have been there to help families. We urged the governor back then to keep those offices open and unfortunately they’re still not open and those individuals continue to have trouble.”

Stoller said all the bad policy makes it harder to answer the questions of constituents in desperate need of help.

“We get a lot of questions of how the system could not have these safeguards in place and here it is a month later and we still haven’t gotten a handle on this,” he said. “This has been a very frustrating year and these are things that should not have happened. It’s very difficult for us to explain to taxpayers why these offices are closed.”