BAD NEWS: ILLINOIS IN WORST FINANCIAL SHAPE SINCE 2006, TOPINKA REPORT SAYS

03/13/2014
Matt Dietrich
Executive editor
Reboot Illinois

The Illinois Comptroller’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report is a yearly financial post-mortem on the immediate past fiscal year. This year’s report is a 351-page monument to the financial wreck we know as the state of Illinois.

If you’re an accountant or auditor, you may delight in the full report and all its gory details. For the rest of us, I’m boiling it down to two graphs and one sentence.

The two graphs below come from Auditor General William Holland’s analysis of the CAFR, as it’s commonly known. They’re fairly self-explanatory, showing two views of the state’s financial decline.

The first chart shows that state government is at a historic low point for its deficit related to “governmental activities.” Basically that means the stuff government does compared to what that stuff costs. It maps how fast and how far state finances have fallen since 2006 – when they weren’t all that great. From 2006 to 2013, the deficit grew by 250 percent.

The news is somewhat better, on a highly relative scale, when it comes to funding day-to-day expenses from the state’s general revenue fund. Holland notes that the state’s checkbook ended last year only $7.3 billion in the red.

And here’s the sentence that caught my eye from page 5 of Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka’s report:

“As of June 30, 2013, the five State funded retirement systems were at a 39.3% funded ratio using a five year ‘smoothing’ valuation of assets with $100.501 billion in unfunded liability.”

We’ve long known about the dangerously low funding of the five pension systems, which led to the passage in December of a major pension reform bill. But Topinka’s report makes it official that Illinois has surpassed the $100 billion mark in unfunded pension liability.

This will be good news to editors and reporters across the state who no longer will have to describe the state’s long-term pension obligations – previously pegged at $97 billion — as “nearly” $100 billion.

You can read Holland’s summary of his report here. It’s not nearly as daunting as the full CAFR, and he breaks things down in easy-to-understand language.

Topinka’s full report is here. It’s long but also packed with charts and graphics that will give you a pretty good idea that recovering from past mismanagement is going to take a long time, some forceful leadership and, probably, a lot of spending cuts.

Illinois schools aren’t doing any better financially than the state overall. See the latest school finance report card here.

Find out where the Republican candidates for governor stand on important issues quickly and easily with our interactive election scorecard.

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Matthew Dietrich is Reboot’s executive editor. An award-winning journalist, Dietrich is the former editorial page editor of the State Journal Register in Springfield. He believes in holding our politicians accountable. Read Dietrich’s take on the leadership vacuum that sent Illinois sinking. You can find Reboot on Facebook at and on Twitter @rebootillinois.