Deborah Witzburg: Chicago's City Council must protect the inspector general from political influence

Chicago Tribune

10-07-2025

Chicago's City Council will soon consider a critical ordinance that would protect the effectiveness and independence of the Chicago Office of Inspector General. OIG is a nonpartisan watchdog for city taxpayers, charged with ensuring economy, effectiveness, efficiency and integrity in the operations of city government. As with all inspector general work, independence is the hallmark and the lifeblood of what we do. Our work must be protected from political influence or interference so that we can root out misconduct and mismanagement — in a city government with a prodigious history of both — without fear or favor.
The ordinance would make important changes to the Municipal Code to bring Chicago into line with national standards and federal law on independent oversight. Specifically, the proposed changes would ensure that city attorneys cannot withhold relevant evidence from OIG investigations and would prohibit city attorneys from sitting in on confidential OIG investigative interviews.
City Hall has improperly asserted attorney-client privilege to withhold evidence in numerous investigations during my tenure as inspector general. OIG needs full access to city records to conduct thorough investigations, and all city officials and employees are required by law to cooperate in OIG investigations, including by providing full access to those records. This is a long-resolved issue at the federal level; inspectors general for federal agencies (including, for example, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice) are entitled to access their agencies' records that would be protected by attorney-client privilege from disclosure to a third party.
The Association of Inspectors General, the national standard-setting and certifying body for inspectors general, has issued a position paper stating that improperly blocking access to privileged records — just as the city is doing — impairs independent oversight and contravenes national standards.
The pending ordinance would also clarify the Municipal Code to protect the confidentiality of OIG investigations, including to protect whistleblowers and witnesses from personal and political retaliation, by making clear that city lawyers may not sit in on confidential investigative interviews. When OIG interviews a person who is subject to an investigation, that person is entitled to have their lawyer in the room. The mayor, however, is not entitled to have his lawyer in the room. The presence of city attorneys in OIG investigative interviews would compromise confidentiality and chill candid testimony; I will not ask city employees to fulfill their duties to report misconduct and to cooperate with our investigations while being monitored by the mayor's lawyers. Here, too, national standards are clear: The national body has also issued a position paper stating that attorneys representing the overseen agency cannot properly be permitted to attend confidential investigative interviews.
During my tenure as inspector general, the city's Law Department has repeatedly demanded to attend interviews in investigations, including ones into allegations of bribery, retaliation via the withholding of city services and retaliation against individuals who made protected reports to OIG, as well as an allegation that a now-former elected official violated ethics rules by soliciting political contributions from city employees. Because I will not permit City Hall to compromise the confidentiality and independence of OIG investigations, these demands have resulted in the cancellation of interviews and the near-certain loss of relevant evidence.
The reforms proposed in this ordinance are critical measures, drawn directly from national best practices, to protect OIG's ability to carry out its mission without obstruction or interference from City Hall. This is an effort to bring Chicago out of the backwoods of government accountability and into line with widely accepted government oversight standards. There are many exceptional things about Chicago, but a lack of protections for oversight in a historically, theatrically corrupt government ought not be one of them.
City Council members might be presented with two kinds of arguments against these reforms. The first might be one based in self-interest — an appeal to desires to weaken the oversight to which aldermen are themselves subject. I hope we can all be confident that the people who have raised their hands to serve on the City Council have done so in order to serve the interests of their constituents above their own.
The second kind of anti-reform argument might be a full-throated defense of the way things have been done before. And about that, I will say this: All of us in city government ought to work every day to make good on the proposition that Chicagoans deserve better than what they have always gotten from their government. Chicagoans deserve a government that is less corrupt and more accountable, and less opaque and more efficient. We cannot continue to do things the same way and expect different outcomes — and the people in power in this city are not entitled to the status quo.
I am deeply hopeful that Chicago is, at long last and long overdue, ready for reform.