The finding, in one comparison
The City of Chicago Office of Inspector General — the City's independent watchdog, which audits municipal departments and publishes the results — examined how the Department of Buildings inspects permitted construction work and published its findings in 2022. The comparison at the center of that audit is the single most useful fact a reader of Chicago permit records can carry.
For permits that require a certificate of occupancy — the document the City issues when a building may lawfully be occupied — the Department had completed 98.9% of required inspections, and 97.2% of those received passing marks, across 1,236 unique permits. For new construction permits generally, most of which do not require a certificate of occupancy, only 16.7% had all related inspections completed.
Those two rates measure the same legal obligation under the same department in the same period. The gap between them is not a measurement artifact; it is the product of a structural difference set out below. And it has not been closed: the Office of Inspector General published a follow-up on June 5, 2024 concluding that the Department had not implemented corrective actions for the audit's findings.
What the document is
The audit is titled Audit of the Department of Buildings' Permit Inspections Process and was published on August 25, 2022. The Office of Inspector General's own headline for it was that the Department's process for inspecting construction work allows some permit holders to construct and occupy uninspected buildings. The audit was conducted under generally accepted government auditing standards.
The follow-up, Follow-up to the Audit of the Department of Buildings' Permit Inspections Process, was published on June 5, 2024. Follow-up reports of this kind exist to record whether a department did what it said it would do after an audit. This one found that it had not.
Both documents are public, and both are cited throughout this site. This page is where the evidence lives in full, because almost every other judgment made here about what a Chicago permit record proves rests on these two reports.
Scope and method
The audit covered permits issued between January 1, 2017 and December 31, 2019. Within that window it examined 146,323 building permits, of which 125,844 were in scope — new construction, renovation, Easy Permit and electrical permits — and matched them against 249,700 inspection requests recorded between 2017 and November 13, 2020.
The headline rate comes from the new construction population: the Department issued 5,351 new construction permits in 2017 through 2019, and as of April 27, 2021, only 16.7% of them had all related inspections completed.
The audit then drew a targeted sample of 80 new construction permits for closer examination. The Office of Inspector General states explicitly that this was not a statistical sample and cannot be extrapolated to the whole population. That limitation is the report's own, and it should travel with every figure drawn from the sample.
One internal inconsistency is worth noting for anyone citing the report: its methodology gives a data review date of November 13, 2020, while the open-permit figures discussed below are given as of December 2020. The two dates do not agree within the document, so each figure is best attributed to the date the report itself gives it.
The sample of 80, and the 42 finished buildings
Of the 80 permits examined closely, 42 corresponded to fully constructed buildings — including 35 single-family homes, several of which had already been sold or were listed for sale. For 20 the construction status could not be assessed, and 18 had no inspections because construction had not begun or the permit had been voided.
The inspection state of those 42 finished buildings is the part of the report that should change how a permit history is read:
- 4 had no inspections at all;
- 25 had rough inspections but no final inspections;
- 10 had some rough inspections and no final inspections;
- 3 had some rough and some final inspections.
Across those 42 buildings, 398 inspections were required. The Department completed 198 of them — 49.7%. Only 11 of the 398 received passing marks. The Department had completed at least one inspection for 38 of the 42 buildings, which is why a permit history can look active and still describe a building nobody signed off on.
The dominant pattern — 25 of 42 — is a building that was finished while its record stops at the rough stage. A reader who sees a rough electrical inspection marked passed, and nothing after it, is looking at the signature of exactly that situation.
Why the two rates diverge: the certificate of occupancy
The mechanism is not complicated and the report states it plainly. The City does not initiate inspections. The duty sits with the permit holder: the Municipal Code of Chicago at § 14A-5-502.3, as quoted in the audit, provides that the permit holder must notify the building official when work done pursuant to a permit is ready for inspection. The Office of Inspector General found that the Department does not initiate an inspection unless it receives a request from a permit holder or a complaint, and that its system does not flag general contractors who fail to ask.
A certificate of occupancy is the only thing that makes a permit holder need the final inspection, because without the certificate the building cannot lawfully be occupied. Where the incentive exists, the inspections happen — 98.9%. Where it does not, they largely do not — 16.7%.
And the exemption is wide. The audit records that single-family homes and two- or three-flats do not require certificates of occupancy. That places the overwhelming majority of Chicago residential buildings in the class with no forcing mechanism at all. The Office of Inspector General's own recommendation was that the City should consider requiring certificates of occupancy for a wider variety of buildings — which is the clearest statement by the City's own auditor of the distance between a permit record and proof that anyone inspected the work.
What the audit found about the record itself
A second set of findings concerns the reliability of the permit record as a signal of anything, and it is why this site treats permit status as close to uninformative.
- As of December 2020, 82.6% of permits remained open.
- 72.5% of permits had no associated inspection requests at all.
- 65.6% of permits with required inspections did not appear to have received complete inspections.
- The Department does not consistently close permits after required inspections are completed, and different divisions use the closed status differently.
- Electrical permits for maintenance work, which need no inspection, are generally not closed or deleted, and the system cannot distinguish them from construction electrical permits.
- The Department's system cannot identify all uncompleted required inspections.
Against that, one figure cuts the other way and deserves to be stated: the Department scheduled inspections for 91.5% of the 155,756 construction inspection requests it received in 2017 through 2019. The department responds when it is asked. The failure the audit documents is not of response but of initiation — nobody asked, and nothing in the system noticed.
The practical conclusion for a reader is that an open permit does not mean unfinished work and a closed permit does not mean inspected work. Permit status is not a completion signal in either direction.
The Department's response, and the 2024 follow-up
The Department of Buildings agreed with most of the audit's findings. It reported putting in place a daily email listing permits over six months old with no inspection requests, with plans to assign those locations to inspectors. It did not describe specific steps to improve data quality, and the report notes that the Department has been working to replace its data system for more than a decade. Its response described the permit holder's affirmative duty to ask for the inspections a certificate of occupancy requires.
The follow-up published on June 5, 2024 concluded that the Department had not implemented corrective actions. That is the sentence that keeps the 2022 figures live rather than historical. An audit finding that a department has since fixed describes a past problem; an audit finding that a department has not acted on describes a present one, and the records being generated today are being generated under the process the audit described.
Nothing in either report is about any individual building. The audit measures a system, and its sample is expressly not statistical. What it establishes is the base rate — the prior a reader should bring to any Chicago permit record before looking at the particular facts in front of them.