Attorneys review Chicago Teachers Union audits following congressional request

By Jim Talamonti | The Center Square
The Center Square

(The Center Square) – The Chicago Teachers Union says it has complied with a U.S. House committee’s request to release financial audits, but attorneys challenging the union in court say they are still reviewing the documents.

On Oct. 8, 2024, the Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit in Cook County circuit court on behalf of four CTU members after they said the union failed to produce the audits for four years.

Last November, the U.S. House Committee on Education and Workforce sent a letter to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, asking the union to produce audits from 2019 to 2024.

CTU said it received notice that the Department of Labor was launching a compliance audit program on Jan. 16, the same day the union said it complied with the House committee’s request.

Ángel Valencia, Senior Counsel for the Liberty Justice Center, said attorneys are reviewing the audits for union members who asked for them.

“The information that the union has produced in the past has just been a lot of very short, self-serving, self-drafted summaries of audits which have not been sufficient,” Valencia told The Center Square.

Valencia said the lawsuit is independent of the attention CTU is drawing from the House committee and the Department of Labor.

“We appreciate the interest that the House committee has shown for this issue, but we in no way are associated with that,” Valencia said.

An update posted on the CTU website by union leadership said the audits had already been made available.

“In fact, Liberty Justice plaintiff, Phil Weiss, has already come into the office and reviewed the full audits himself. More detail on the union’s finances is already available in federal findings,” the CTU statement said.

Mailee Smith, vice president of labor and litigation for the Illinois Policy Institute, said CTU did not release the audits willingly.

“It took pressure from multiple fronts. Members had to file a lawsuit, a U.S. House committee started investigating, the Department of Labor sent a letter to the union indicating it might suspect some financial mismanagement,” Smith told TCS.

CTU said it has always been in compliance with its own bylaws, but Smith said it took a lawsuit for members to get the audits the bylaws entitle them to get.

“That lawsuit would have had no legs. It would have been dismissed if CTU had released the audits as it claimed,” Smith said.

Smith said the both House committee and the Department of Labor appear to be looking into whether CTU is following the law in terms of transparency to members and whether the law or the way the Labor Department collects data needs to be changed.

“The House investigation appears to have started because that House committee was looking for general information on how the labor laws work and if they are properly assisting members in obtaining accountability from their leaders and ensuring transparency,” Smith said.

CTU leadership said the letter from the Republican-led committee requested five years of audits, related meeting minutes and member requests to review them based on citations exclusively from the Illinois Policy Institute.

“We’re being investigated because we make improving the education, communities, and lives of our Black, Latine, and largely low-income student body our first order of business,” said the CTU leaders’ update.