Dunking on Illinois: Making a Record in a Bad Way -- Over Two Years to Report Financials

But seriously, what happened here? And.... NEVADA IS EVEN WORSE

What the actual hell, Illinois.

21 Aug 2025, Truth in Accounting: Illinois Sets a New National Record: 774 Days Late with Financial Reporting

Illinois has finally released its audited Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR).

The bad news: It’s for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2023.

According to the Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA), states should release these reports within 180 days of the fiscal year’s end. Illinois blew past that deadline—releasing its 2023 report a staggering 774 days late, setting a new national record.

At Truth in Accounting, we believe states should aim to meet the stricter standard used by corporations, which is around 100 days. After all, why should governments be allowed to hold themselves to lower standards than companies that are accountable to shareholders?

I’m going to interrupt for a moment, before I get to the TIA’s fact pattern (and graph).

Reminder:

• The budget is merely a plan.

• The audited financials tell you what actually happened. (Kinda… let’s ignore the pensions right now.)

When you are putting the next budget together, you’d like to know how well prior budgets (aka forecasts) performed against actuals — but if you don’t have the audited financials to see how far the budgets slipped, to see how far off they were on revenue or expenditures… how can you plan?

Back to TIA’s piece:

The delayed release of Illinois' 2023 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) left lawmakers and taxpayers without critical financial insights during key budgeting decisions. For instance, without access to audited financial data from the previous two years, Illinois still approved a record $55.2 billion budget for 2026, a $2 billion increase from the prior year. This lack of information risks overlooking hidden liabilities and revenue shortfalls.

To be sure, there can be some information that isn’t fully audited.

Let’s see how other states are doing:

Meanwhile, 43 states have already released their 2024 reports, covering the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2024. Illinois has yet to release its 2024 report.

Uh, why would they have released the 2024 report? They just released the 2023 one.

And here is the history:

They’ve never released the report in 180 days, going back to 2009.

At least they did it within a year, for 2013 - 2017. And 2019. (This is eyeballing the graph).

Why was the report so late?

What exactly was the hold-up?

Back in July, there was this story:

21 July 2025, The Center Square: Illinois comptroller ‘frustrated’ with late annual audits, says FY25 will be quicker

Illinois taxpayers still don’t have audited financials from fiscal year 2023, but the state’s comptroller says they’re working to speed annual reports up.

…. [jumping over TIA’s Sheila Weinberg’s comments]….

Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendoza said they are waiting on the Auditor General to finish their audit so it can be published.

“It has been incredibly frustrating that we've not been able to issue the full annual comprehensive financial report for 2023 and for 2024,” Mendoza told The Center Square. “But the reality is that we cannot issue either here until the Illinois Auditor General's office completes their audit.”

So why wasn’t the audit done in a timely manner?

“Which will be a full statewide audit versus an audit of all these individual agencies that then gets put together,” Mendoza said. “So I've been calling and pushing for this change for my first term as comptroller.”

Mendoza said Illinois is unique from most other states in that Illinois audits each individual state agency, rather than a statewide audit. But, in conversations with the Auditor General and the Illinois Governor’s Office, Mendoza said they’re doing a statewide audit for fiscal year 2025.

“All three of us are now on the same page that we cannot continue to have these chronically late reports,” she said.

Ah, this reminds me.

When I was waiting for a particular year of mortality data to get finalized by the CDC, I believe a specific state was holding everybody up. The CDC could not say which say which state it was (though I had my suspicions, given what I saw in preliminary data).

As Mendoza says, having these itty-bitty audits means that one recalcitrant/screwed-up agency can delay the finalized ACFR by an inordinate amount … though given this is Illinois, I bet it was more than one agency.

As the various downstate police/fire pensions were forced to give up some control over their pension funds (I’m not going to get into this right now), forcing a more centralized audit process will likely speed this up.

Best wishes, Comptroller Mendoza!

Data-Z Charts of Other Tardy States

But wait! There’s an EVEN TARDIER STATE!

NEVADA!

On 31 July 2025, Sheila Weinberg of TIA noted in Where, Oh Where Are the State Financial Reports? that multiple states had outstanding ACFRs… for FY2024.

But also noticed that FY2023 reports were missing for Illinois and Nevada. Well, we’ve got Illinois now, and … I went to look:

Yup, the 2022 ACFR is the last one available.

Using TIA’s DATA-Z site, I used some (but not all) of the tardy states to compare:

A few of the tardy states, SOURCE: Data-Z.org, accessed 22 Aug 2025

Those are still too many lines, so let me show you, state by state:

Arizona

Arizona is all over the place. This is just a mess.

California

California’s troubles started BEFORE the pandemic. So they can’t blame that.

Skipping Illinois, as we saw it above, already.

Nevada

Nevada’s issue could be COVID-related… but… COME ON. What IS that?

We’re still here, waiting on 2023 from Nevada. They’re going to beat Illinois’s record. Yay Nevada.

Oklahoma

Um, something happened there. They had been doing so well… a small bobble in 2020 (remember, fiscal years tend to end June 30, so 2020 is June 30, 2020). So even with the pandemic, 2020 and 2021 reports were just a little longer than the “usual” 180 days.

Then WHOMP.

What happened, Oklahoma?

Tangent: A comment on a Catholic website

I left the following comment on a paid post at The Pillar, a Catholic website:

Speaking as an actuary -- though not a pension actuary, I do have experience with annuities and have long followed issues surround pensions of all types.

Yes, there are huge reasons to report on "old news" surrounding pension funds, because these are very long-term programs. The Vatican pension system (for their employees, not the clergy) is still in a dire state.

The way pensions get into trouble is generally not a year or two of bad behavior, but decades' worth of poor management, including a "the pension system can't possibly fail!" attitude. Well, there have been noises about that pension plan failing. It started well before a decade ago. (And definitely before last year.)

The reason I subscribe to The Pillar has primarily been Ed's (and others', but primarily Ed's) reporting on financial malfeasance and mismanagement in the Church. We don't get enough coverage of that, mainly because most of the people in the space don't have the skills to understand the issues. (Yes, there's the buddy-buddy problem, too, but even if that didn't exist, most of the people around this space, even in secular media, don't understand this stuff.)

Thanks, Ed!

“Ed” is Ed Condon, one of the founders of The Pillar.

I’ve made a few posts and podcast episodes based on Ed’s reporting on financial issues surrounding the Catholic Church:

• 12 Apr 2025: Podcast - Vatican Pensions: Will the Participants Get Their Promised Benefits?

• 5 May 2025: Podcast - The Next Pope and Vatican Finances

• 23 Aug 2022: Podcast - Public Pensions, ESG, DeSantis, and The Catholic Church

• 18 Dec 2024: Pensions Round-Up: ESG, Skipping Payments, Technological Debt, and More! - yes, this really has a Catholic angle

• 7 Jun 2024: Podcast - Fraud and Embezzlement! How to Prevent and Detect

There are likely a few other posts, but I feel this is a good sampling.

The point here is not about Catholic anything, but has more to do with Ed Condon’s unusual skills as a journalist, and what Sheila Weinberg has done with Truth in Accounting… and the additional skills needed to beef up general journalism:

[from 6+ years ago]

Journalists need to understand math better… and they need to understand money (and accounting) better. I’m talking about general interest journalism — I mainly deal with financial sector journalism, and those folks understand math, finance, and accounting just fine, thanks very much.

TIA put together this DATA-Z site, and it’s FREE!

(To be fair, I don’t think many people know about it. Maybe it needs more promotion!)

But when I see something drastic like that huge delay in the release of Oklahoma financials… and I ask why…. I tried to see if there was any reporting on it, other than Sheila’s complaints.

I wasn’t able to find anything, but then internet search has also gone to crap in this grand age of AI.

Or the Nevada delay.

What’s going on there?

I don’t know.

Does anybody in those states know what’s going on?