In 2019, DuPage County enacted a 3% sales tax on the sale of cannabis products, three months ahead of legalization, the Illinois Department of Revenue (IDOR) never got the memo.
For two years the County Cannabis Retailers’ Occupation Tax (CCAN) went unrecognized by the Local Tax Allocation Division (LTAD) of IDOR; in those two years, the county lost out on millions of potential tax dollars.
In May, DuPage County Auditor Bill White was tasked with finding out how this mistake happened. White stood before the County Board last month to explain the nearly four years of dysfunction within the auditor’s office and promised to release a report regarding the CCAN during the July 9 board meeting.
“We very seldom have a new revenue source, I think it’s a very valid thing to say that we should all have been saying where’s this money,” DuPage County Board President Deborah Conroy said Tuesday.
The report states that the DuPage County Clerk’s Office had mailed the CCAN ordinance to IDOR, but was not directly delivered to LTAD, and County Clerk staff had said it was not their responsibility to confirm receipt of documents by third parties.
“We are left with the June 28, 2024 report by Auditor White which is woefully inadequate and functionally useless in resolving the lingering question of how DuPage County failed to realize for years that it was failing to collect millions of dollars of cannabis sales tax,” DuPage County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek said in a letter to White.
The disconnect between LTAD and the County wasn’t caught until September 2021, and the CCAN ordinance was implemented on Jan. 1, 2022.
In a June 20 letter to White, Chief Deputy County Clerk Adam Johnson faults the DuPage County Board Chair and staff, citing their responsibility to “ensure that all of the orders, resolutions, and regulations of the County Board are faithfully executed.”
During Tuesday’s meeting, multiple board commissioners took issue with the auditor’s report. “This report is perfunctory, it doesn’t include every entity that should have been included and if we want transparency, if we truly want to fix the disconnects, we need to have a more thorough audit,” District 4 Commissioner Lynn LaPlante said.
The report concludes with a list of recommendations to avoid a similar failure in the future, including the adoption of document handling procedures by the clerk’s office, and for the County Board to establish policies regarding the distribution of resolutions.
“I guess you gave it the old college try, but we’re no closer to knowing anything about how this happened,” District 6 Commissioner James Zay said during Tuesday’s board meeting. “This is a black eye for DuPage, I’ve never seen the biggest bunch of finger-pointing and blaming everyone else and no one taking responsibility whatsoever.”
