Truth in Accounting’s Sheila Weinberg on Illinois’ pension mess and whether budgets are ‘balanced’

Full Video is here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Summary:

Public Affairs’ Jeff Berkowitz sits down for a conversation with Sheila Weinberg, Founder and CEO of “Truth in Accounting,” since 2002 and whose mission is to compel governments to produce financial reports that are understandable, reliable, transparent and correct. Sheila Weinberg received her Certified Public Accountant, also known as a CPA, credential in 1981, along with a Bachelor of Accounting degree from the University of Denver, which she attended on an academic scholarship. Ms. Weinberg’s research initiatives include “The Truth about Balanced Budgets, a Fifty State Study,” the Financial State of the States and the Financial State of the Union.

Shelia has spent decades practicing her professional career as a national expert in accounting, government finance and budgeting. This career consists, among other things, of judging how well our 50 states and large cities are doing by applying the science of accounting to assess the performance of those states and cities. The bottom states and cities in the rankings are known “as Sinkhole states and cities,” and Chicago is one of the worst sinkhole cities and IL one of the worst sinkhole states. So, on what basis has Gov. Pritzker asserted for the last six years that his budgets are “Balanced.”

Only by ignoring the dictates of actuarial science and instead replacing those dictates with the statutory requirements, which were set by politicians, and not the science of financial accounting and sound economics and Policy, which has been practiced for decades by Shelia at Truth in Accounting and by Ted Dabrowski for decades, as President of Wirepoints and Vice President of Policy at the Policy Institute and also a repeat guest of Public Affairs.

Pritzker, in his February 2026 address to the IL General Assembly about his proposed FY2026 budget, misrepresented for the 6th year in a row his budget as balanced. The Governor seemingly ignores actuaries, most likely even those on his own Governor’s Office of Management and Budget (“GOMB”) staff, who if they followed their science, told him that IL should contribute 16.8 billion dollars to their five pension funds. Instead, the Governor proposed an 11.7 billion dollar contribution, which shorts the pension funding by more than five billion dollars, or 30%. Further, Governor Pritzker’s IL pension contributions, as Truth in Accounting documents and as presented during the show, also fell short of actuarially determined (or required) contributions by 25% to 32%, annually, during 2020- 2026.

So, as Sheila Weinberg says during the show, how can Pritzker be said to have had balanced budgets during his tenure as Governor over the last six years, when he keeps shorting the actuarial required contributions by 4 to 5 billion dollars a year? In sum, Weinberg, accuses Gov Pritzker of “Putting IL at risk” of being accused of a fiscal policy misrepresentation each time he publicly stated or states IL has or had a balanced budget.

Sheila Weinberg said IL under Pritzker will not have enough money to pay the benefits it promised, as calculated by the actuaries, so it will “Have to cut pension benefits, cut other government services or raise taxes to plug the quarter of trillion dollars IL pension hole.” Further, citing to a Wirepoints slide, Weinberg says the average Chicago household will have to pay $95, 000 in the future just to keep up with the old, unfunded pension debt.

Under the current law, Chicago doesn’t have the power to file for bankruptcy, but it could go the equivalent of “Belly up.” So, Weinberg says it is definitely “Misleading,” for Pritzker to state: He is proposing a balanced budget in FY2026 (or that he has done so each year he has been Governor).

Berkowitz and Weinberg discuss whether Gov Pritzker is breaking IL’s promise in the 2013 Settlement Agreement with the SEC not to repeat the policy of making misrepresentations similar to those it made in 2009. Show host Berkowitz discusses with Truth in Accounting’s Weinberg whether the SEC could prosecute IL again in the future based on what Pritzker has been saying now in terms of deceptive fiscal policy statements and misrepresentations regarding balanced budgets. The SEC could argue that Pritzker statements outside the context of statements made to investors could still qualify as deceptive and misrepresentations because they were directed at citizens and taxpayers, such as the statements he made on February 26 to the General Assembly that his proposed FY 2026 budget is “Balanced.”