Audit: About 1,400 city stickers 'missing'

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Updated: November 30, 2010 9:28PM

Nearly 1,400 city stickers are "missing" and unaccounted for - at a potential loss to Chicago taxpayers of $134,325 - because of lax internal controls and sloppy record-keeping at a satellite city clerk's office where residents paid $3.9 million last year to purchase city stickers, passports and residential parking permits and dog licenses, a new audit shows.

City Clerk Miguel del Valle requested the audit in 2006 and insisted that the deficiencies identified by Inspector General Joe Ferguson have since been corrected by an electronic cashiering system that "virtually eliminates the chance for any error in the cashiering and selling of city stickers." The audit covered a 2 1/2 year period that started before del Valle took office in late 2006. It continued through 2008.

As for the 1,380 stickers described as "missing" and unaccounted for during the year-long period ending on June 30, 2008, the clerk's office believes there's a perfectly legitimate explanation for it that has nothing to do with theft, skimming or black-market sales.

The alleged discrepancies occurred at a satellite office at 5301 S. Cicero that was moved in August, 2008, to 5674 S. Archer. The inspector general further uncovered a "recording error" of $26,635 in sales posted to the "wrong clerk's office location."

"At the time, everything was handwritten. It was sent to an outside vendor to be keyed in. If you handwrote the application and it was illegible, it wouldn't have been entered into the database or captured electronically," said Kristine Williams, a spokesperson for the city clerk's office.

"We believe - and it is our position - that everything was sold, and the cash was captured. But the remaining 1,380 stickers were simply not recorded because they couldn't be read."

Jonathan Davey, a spokesman for the Inspector General's office, said there is no way of knowing what happened to the stickers.

"The stickers are gone. They didn't sell them. Or if they did, there's no record of it. We're not making any allegations that employees stole or misused these stickers. We're just saying they're missing," Davey said.

The audit comes at a sensitive time for del Valle, who is leaving the office to run for mayor. But Williams believes her boss comes out smelling like a rose, since he requested the audit and installed the electronic cashiering system that replaced the loosey-goosey old system that lacked internal controls. The only point of contention is whether the clerk's written policies and employee handbook are sufficient. Del Valle believes they are. Ferguson maintains they're not.

In 2007, a 13-year veteran employee of the clerk's office was accused of stealing $450 by charging motorists the full fee for discounted senior citizen stickers and pocketing the difference.

Bohdan Kukuruza was accused of using the scheme 10 times in June 2006 while allegedly writing false driver's license numbers on sticker applications to cover his tracks. Kukuruza was fired, but the charges against him were subsequently dismissed because there were no procedures in place to prevent it.

The allegations against Kukuruza were a minor offshoot of a much larger investigation into alleged skimming at the South Side facility.

In February, 2008, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that bookkeeping at the clerk's satellite office was so lax that tens of thousands of dollars could be either missing or unaccounted for over the past several years, sources said.

The investigation had an element of political intrigue because of the five employees who have worked at the South Side facility.

They included Traci Jones, whose husband, Mick, wore a wire to help bring down his lifelong friend, convicted City Clerk Jim Laski. The Cicero staff also included Sherry Janus, stepdaughter of Laski's convicted political operative Sam Gammichia, and Debbie Krystiniak, sister-in-law of former Ald. William Krystiniak (23rd).

After getting released from prison and writing a tell-all book, Laski questioned why the inspector general's investigation was taking so long.

At the time, the convicted clerk said he got a letter detailing the alleged skimming at the Cicero facility shortly after he was indicted on charges of accepting $48,000 in bribes in exchange for steering Hired Truck business to a company owned by Mick and Traci Jones.

Laski said he turned the letter over to the FBI and U.S. attorney's office and assumed the city's inspector general would follow up on the "very specific" allegations. He refused to say who wrote the letter.