By Joe Ragusa

BLOOMINGTON – The Illinois Treasurer’s office is going through some changes.

First-term Treasurer Michael Frerichs hired an auditing firm to investigate how the office can be run more efficiently, and one thing the firm found was an expensive internship program.

“So what we want to do is scale it back dramatically,” Frerichs said. “Don’t offer paid internships and provide meaningful experiences for them.”

Frerichs said the old internship program cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and mostly hired applicants based on clout.

A report detailing potential violations of former Illinois Treasurer Dan Rutherford is still being withheld from the public.

Frerichs tells WJBC’s Terry James the release of the report is up to the state’s lawyers.

“I would think things could be resolved fairly quickly, but when they get into the courts, they seem to move a lot more slowly than I would imagine and a lot more slowly than a lot of people in the public would like,” Frerichs said.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is representing Rutherford in a lawsuit filed by a former employee who says he was sexually harassed by Rutherford and forced to do political work on state time.

LISTEN: WJBC’s Terry James talks with Illinois Treasurer Michael Frerichs.

Joe Ragusa can be reached at [email protected].