North Cook News

As investigators continue to probe an apparent payroll scandal at Governors State University, Cook County Republican Board Commissioner Sean Morrison is certain of at least one thing.

“When government bureaucrats are spending taxpayer dollars, there seems to be no onus placed on making sure those dollars are being spent in an appropriate manner,” Morrison told the North Cook News. “When patronage and nepotism rule the day, this is what you get.”

Still, Morrison concedes that what is alleged to have taken place on the University Park campus may be in a class all its own. 

Governors State University President Elaine Maimon

According to the Chicago Tribune, an executive inspector general report recently concluded that the school continued to pay full salaries to at least 33 former employees long after they had left the university. Estimates place the amount the university has paid out to either individuals that had been officially terminated or those who no longer had job descriptions in the neighborhood of $1.5 million.

While school officials have attributed at least part of the mix-up to a faulty system used for documenting the cases of terminated employees, Morrison argues that a lot of questions still need answers.

“I would like to see a thorough investigation just to rule out the possibility of their having been collusion or just the case of a patronage system,” he said. “If any criminality at all is found to be part of this, it needs to be prosecuted and there need to be civil suits involved.”

Up until this point, much of the blame has fallen on the shoulders of GSU President Elaine Maimon, whom watchdog investigators allege authorized falsified time sheets and “mismanaged” the terminations of several staffers. But in her interview with investigators, Maimon, who is set to retire next summer after 12 years at the helm, claimed that she was not directly involved in any decisions related to the scandal. She also insisted that she is unaware of any workers being paid for jobs they didn’t perform and that she was never involved in submitting any timecards on behalf of anyone who did not work the hours. 

The inspector general interviewed 14 former employees of the school, concluding that many of them were given wildly different instructions for how to ensure that they could receive compensation and benefits after having been terminated.

“As far as the administrators go, again, this just shows us the level of incompetence we have at some of these state institutions,” Morrison said. “To me, that’s a systemic management issue.”