After the state notified Lake County officials about miscalculations of the county’s Property Tax Replacement Credit by millions of dollars since 2023, members of the Lake County Council expressed disappointment Tuesday with Lake County Auditor Peggy Holinga Katona, who council members said hasn’t come into work for 4 years.
The council voted 7-0 Tuesday to send a letter to the Lake County Commissioners to request a joint executive session to discuss the auditor’s office.
Katona told the Post-Tribune that she hasn’t been to work for 3 years after sustaining serious injuries, including breaking her leg, fracturing her back, and tearing both rotator cuffs, following a fall in the hallway of the Lake County Government Center. Katona said she’s had six surgeries to address her injuries.
The auditor’s office has been running smoothly, Katona said, and she communicates with her staff throughout the day. Katona said the council’s action could impact her reelection in the county auditor’s race in the 2026 election. Katona is being challenged by Lake County Recorder Gina Pimentel and former Calumet Township Assessor’s Office Chief of Staff Sondra Ford.
“That was absolutely deliberate,” Katona said. “They come to work once, twice a month, and they’re picking at me. I am well in touch with the office.”
Mike Wieser, a contractor with the auditor’s office, told the council Tuesday that the county’s PTRC will be reduced from about 17% credit to about 13% credit. Wieser said credit errors were made by the employees in the auditor’s and treasurer’s office who didn’t understand the PTRC system.
“The people that were doing it didn’t quite understand how the whole system worked. Everybody that was working on it had a bit or piece of it, but nobody knew how to look at the thing holistically,” Wieser said.
Taxpayers are going to pay about 4% more, spread out across the taxpayer base, in property taxes because the credit will be reduced, said Councilman Randy Niemeyer, R-7th.
In 2023, the State Board of Accounts audit found the miscalculations in the PTRC, Wieser said. By 2025, the PTRC was overstated by about $40 million as a result of the credit errors since 2023, Wieser said.
This year, the county has “since reconciled everything” and the PTRC fund started with a negative balance. By the end of 2026, everything will be cleaned up in the fund, he said.
Each of the three years, one step in the PTRC system was missed, Wieser said, and that was transferring the money from the fund to the treasurer. The treasurer “passed the money out and didn’t notice” for three years that there wasn’t enough money because “nobody made the transfer from the PTRC fund into the treasurer’s cash,” Wieser said.
Ultimately, Wieser said the auditor’s office should have picked up on the miscalculations, though “a bell should’ve gone off” in the treasurer’s office as well.
There is a system for treasurer and auditor reconciliation program, Wieser said, and on paper, the reconciliation calculated over the years showed that all funds are balanced.
“It was on that piece of paper, balanced, if somebody would have transferred the money from Oracle to the treasurer. But nobody pushed that last button,” Wieser said.
Katona said the credit errors with the PTRC were the result of her firing Comptroller Dan Ciecierski, who oversaw the system, for the way he would yell and demean employees in the fall of 2025. She said Ciecierski was hired in May 2024 to replace another employee, who also ran the PTRC, that county officials wanted her to fire.
Katona said she’s in the process of hiring someone to oversee the PTRC program.
Ciecierski responded in a lengthy statement Tuesday night, saying that the timeline of PTRC calculation error was laid out in a Corrective Action Plan that was finalized before he left the office.
“The calculation would have been completed and furnished to the state based on a legacy process months before my arrival in May of 2024,” Ciecierski’s stated. “A process that Peggy Katona herself should have been overseeing. Once my team discovered the error in calculation, I emailed the DLGF June 10, 2025, and began working through a solution with the state that solved the error and was executed in expedient fashion. Fortunately for me, there are emails that support the timing of the errors and the solutions. The timing of those emails tells a very different story than what Peggy has stated.”
He said Katona’s “slanderous” portrayal of his behavior in the office is “completely false.”
“I treated my team and everyone else with the utmost respect and professionalism as I have done throughout the entirety of my career,” Ciecierski’s stated. “You’ll not find one shred of HR evidence, or writeups supporting her statement. In fact, there are plenty of other documented HR writeups for a number of other Auditor Office employees during my tenure. Perhaps Peggy was getting those confused due to the fact that she never came into work. I worked there for a year and a half and never met her once.”
Lake County Treasurer John Petalas told the Post-Tribune that his office has “absolutely nothing to do with calculations with the PTRC.”
The treasurer’s office collects tax dollars, tells the auditor’s office what was collected, and then the auditor distributes the funds to the governmental units, Petalas said. The auditor’s office calculates all PTRC funds, he said.
“That’s all the auditor. The treasurer’s function is to collect the money,” Petalas said.
Petalas declined to comment on Katona not coming into work.
Council President Christine Cid, D-5th, said it was important for taxpayers to realize that they will see a slight increase in their 2026 property taxes not because of the council but “because of the auditor’s office issue.”
Councilman David Hamm, D-1st, said Katona hasn’t been at work for 4 years. When asked when Katona would be returning to work, Wieser said he didn’t have that information.
“I think that the auditor’s office has messed up big time, and I don’t want to confuse with Mr. Petalas and falling in his lap,” Hamm said. “We need people to show up to work. I’m frustrated.”
Councilman Charlie Brown, D-3rd, said he was disappointed to hear that Katona hasn’t been coming into work, especially amid an election year.
“It’s difficult to accept the fact that an elected official is not showing up to work who is running for the same office,” Brown said.
Cid recalled in 2019 when former Lake County Recorder Mike Brown wasn’t coming into work the council had to subpoena him to find out why he wasn’t coming to work and who was running the office.
In 2019, following an Oct. 2018 settlement of $185,000 by the county in a case filed by a former employee who alleged that Brown sexually harassed her, the Lake County Council threatened to reduce Brown’s salary to $1 after reports that he hadn’t shown up to work for 18 months.
Katona said her absenteeism from work is different from Brown’s absenteeism because she was seriously injured while Brown “was doing other things.”
“I was hurt at work. Believe me, if I could take this back, I would,” Katona said.
Lake County Commissioner Michael Repay, D-3rd, said he talks to Katona often and on nearly every call Katona shares with him how upset she is that she can’t go into work because of something that’s not in her control.
Repay said Katona has valid reasons to work outside of the office, and that the auditor’s office continues to function with her checking in throughout the day over the phone. Katona’s situation is not the same as Brown’s situation, Repay said.
“It is quite unique,” Repay said. “It’s not the same thing.”
Repay said the commissioners will meet with the council members, where he hopes to learn more about the PTRC errors and their thoughts on the auditor’s office.
