From the
FOID audit:
The State Police spent nearly $527,000 on overtime pay for employees to process FOID cards between July 1, 2009, and June 30, 2011. Of that, three employees accounted for more than $239,000 of the overtime pay.
Workers were unable to approve or deny all FOID card requests within 30 days, as required by law. During 2008, 2009 and 2010, only 64 percent of the applications were approved within a month, and only 71 percent of them were denied during the required time frame.
Logs of customer-service calls to the FOID division show that 85 percent of the calls in late 2010 - a total of 29,420 calls - were not answered.
So over $250,000 in overtime per year. OR, they could have hired 5 more employees at $50K/year and gotten nearly twice as much work out of them for the money. Nevermind that the ISP is only retrieving 30% of revoked cards.
At $10/card and up to 3K applications/day, that's over $10 million/year for FOID's. Even on the low end of the applications (1000/day), that's over $3.5m/year.*
Where is all this money going?
There are so many levels of fail in this that I have no idea where to start.
*UPDATE: There is some discrepancy and I have been informed the author may have confused the number of cards /week w/ /day. I'm checking into it.
UPDATE 2: Here's the
actual audit report. It looks like the reporter may have added all years together. Based on a 5 day work week, it averaged about 1,200 applications/day in 2010(290K total) which would make 3K/ day a very short period. That totaled about $3m in revenue/year so they spent over a 1/6th of their budget on overtime alone.
