Word: auditor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Illinois last week sign painters were at work expunging the words ELECT ORVILLE E. HODGE, YOUR REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE FOR STATE AUDITOR from a state Republican Party campaign billboard on a main road outside Springfield. In Springfield and Chicago, as the state budgetary commission began a thorough investigation of the state auditor's office, two grand juries, G-men, Internal Revenue men and representatives of half a dozen other county, state and federal agencies were interrogating witnesses, sifting evidence, and painstakingly piecing together a mosaic of one of the biggest financial scandals in Illinois history...
Unaudited Auditor. Reporter Thiem, a 1949 Pulitzer Prizewinner (with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Reporter Roy Harris) for his series exposing state payoffs to 51 downstate editors during Governor Dwight Green's administration (TIME, May 9, 1949), started out by delving into Auditor Hodge's payroll. Right off he found that the list was padded with a Hodge-podge of political bosses, cronies and relatives of the auditor, even included Hodge's personal airplane pilot as a $525-a-month "clerk." Asked why Saline County's Democratic Chairman Harry Erton was on the auditor...
Newsman Thiem soon discovered that the cost of running the auditor's office was so high that in May 1955 Hodge had been forced to ask the legislature for an emergency appropriation. Of $1,450,000 in six key accounts that was supposed to last two years, only $33,000 remained; in one account, a two-year budget of $197,832 was down to $8.33. Thiem also found that the auditor's office, which is required by law to check the books of all Illinois state departments, had not turned in an audit on its own books since...
Most of the suspicious checks carried Hodge's facsimile signature; many had apparently been cashed fraudulently; e.g., Springfield Businessman Clarence J. Reuter pointed out that a $10,385 auditor's check supposedly signed by him was incorrectly endorsed "J. C. Reuter." Moreover, said George P. Coutrakon, state's attorney for Sangamon County (county seat: Springfield), many of the checks in question had been cashed in "suspicious circumstances" at Chicago's Southmoor Bank & Trust Co., which, as a state bank, was under Auditor Hodge's jurisdiction...
...once indicted (and later acquitted) in the murder of a Chicago madam. Fabric-Craft and two other companies headed by Lydon listed two Hodge aides as officers: Chief Personnel Officer Lloyd Lane and Administrative Assistant Edward A. Epping. Epping, half owner of an accounting firm retained by the auditor's office, was accused by a Southmoor Bank attorney of cashing $240,000 worth of suspicious checks...