Illinois lawmakers approve Christopher Meister as new auditor general
SPRINGFIELD — Illinois lawmakers on Wednesday approved the appointment of a new head of the state agency charged with conducting audits of other departments under state government.
Christopher Meister, executive director of the Illinois Finance Authority, was approved 51-0 in the Senate and 97-1 in the House to succeed Frank Mautino, who is retiring as state auditor general.
The legislative appointment begins May 1, when Meister will take office as auditor general, a constitutional office charged with reviewing the use and management of public funds by state agencies, from the Illinois Department of Corrections to the Illinois Department of Human Services. The office reviews agencies’ financial records, as well as compliance with state and federal laws and program performance.
Under the leadership of Mautino, a former Democratic state representative from Spring Valley who served as auditor general for a decade, the office discovered last year how Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration vastly underestimated the cost and appeal of programs that provided state-funded health insurance to immigrants who are not citizens. One of those programs, which provided Medicaid-style health care to middle-aged noncitizens, was eliminated by Pritzker last year to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2024, Mautino’s office revealed that the Illinois Department of Employment Security, responsible for distributing unemployment benefits, failed to handle claims filed during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving auditors unable to determine whether more than $6 million had fallen into the right hands. At the time, the audit sparked more criticism of IDES, which had already faced scrutiny for how it handled the distribution of unemployment benefits throughout the pandemic.
Another report from Mautino’s office, in 2022, examined a COVID outbreak that killed 36 elderly veterans at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home in 2020, showing that the state public health department did not show up at the LaSalle home until 11 days after the outbreak began. The report criticizes the agency for failing to “identify and respond to the severity of the outbreak.”
According to the Illinois Finance Authority website, Meister oversees financial products that include tax-exempt conduit bonds for the nonprofit, industrial, commercial and agricultural sectors, and helps provide resources for economic development and climate energy projects.
As a self-funded agency that does not rely on taxpayer funding, the agency has attracted more than $45 billion in private capital since 2009, under Meister’s leadership, to issue bonds for various projects throughout the state, according to the website.
From 2016 to 2022, Meister served as a member of the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Finance Advisory Council, and in 2012 he was selected as a member of the inaugural Edgar Fellows Program, which promotes bipartisan leadership in Illinois government and is named for its founder, the late Republican Governor Jim Edgar.
