Owe Illinois Taxes? Your Name May Be Online (Once The Site Is Working)

By Sam Bakken in News on Mar 2, 2005 8:30PM

If you owe more than $1000 in taxes to Illinois, your name, address and the amount you owe may have been displayed on the Internet today. The list is supposed to be located at http://www.revenue.state.il.us/app/idt/IDTReport, but we tried it and it isn't working. In 2000 the Illinois Department of Revenue tried to list the names of delinquent tax payers, but took it down when a number of mistakes were found. We were wondering whether they'd already found mistakes and taken this year's list down after just a day.

We called the contact person on the press release, Geraldine Conrad (very helpful and friendly by the way, we think she may have mistaken us for a real reporter of some sort). She assured us it was strictly a technical problem, that they had not taken the list down and that she was able to access the report on her computer. She said they were careful to double and triple check the names this time and that when creating this year's list, "Mistakes from the past were fresh in the mind, even though it was a different administration." Here's a story from the Tribune about some individuals on this year's list that say it's a mistake.

We talked to Geraldine around 2:00 p.m. and she said she had received an e-mail from a reporter saying they couldn't access the report and that other people "upstairs in revenue" were having trouble accessing it as well.

She called the webmaster and said he provided her with some sort of metaphor about her being inside the castle and we being outside the castle and that's why it wasn't working. We don't know what that means either. Anyway, he's working on the issue, but Geraldine couldn't give us any estimate on when it will be back up.

Update: Sharon from the Illinois Department of Revenue called us and said a PDF of the list is now viewable at http://www.revenue.state.il.us/IDT.pdf