(Wis.) State jobs agency lost track of $8 million in overdue loans

Source: Milwaukee Journal sentinel

Madison - For more than a year, the state's flagship jobs agency failed to track whether businesses are repaying loans from state taxpayers - leaving the public in the dark about how much they are owed on a total of $8 million in past-due loans to 99 businesses.

The blunder - only the latest in a whole series of problems at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. - began at nearly the same time as the quasi-public authority championed by Gov. Scott Walker took over for the state's previous jobs agency.

The loans that are past due by at least 30 days - and in some cases much longer than that - amount to 16% of the state agency's total loan portfolio of $51 million in loans, said Ryan Murray, the WEDC's chief operating officer. Murray said he learned from staff late last week that the agency had stopped systematically tracking its loan collection efforts and has no records on those efforts since June 2011, the month before the WEDC started.

The agency is still determining how much taxpayers are owed on the largely state-funded loans and how much is past due. The failure was discovered as the agency prepared materials for an ongoing legislative audit, Murray said, adding that the agency is still investigating how the mistakes were made, why it took so long to discover them and what will happen to those employees who failed to keep tabs on the taxpayer-funded loans.

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