SPRINGFIELD — Illinois’ finances were “one hot mess,” as Comptroller Susana Mendoza put it, the last time voters went to the polls to elect the state’s chief fiscal officer.

Bills went unpaid. Emergency reserves had dwindled to $48,000 — enough, Mendoza’s office said, to run state government for less than 30 seconds. A two-year budget standoff between Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic House Speaker Michael Madigan had gutted state services and rattled the economy.

That was 2016, when Mendoza, a Chicago Democrat, won the first of three terms in office. Now, with her eyeing a run for Chicago mayor, she is stepping down after the November general election — and, for the first time in a decade, Illinois voters must choose her successor.

Four candidates are competing for the Democratic nomination in the March 17 primary: state Rep. Margaret Croke of Chicago, state Rep. Stephanie Kifowit of Oswego, state Sen. Karina Villa of West Chicago, and Lake County Treasurer Holly Kim of Mundelein. The lone Republican in the race is Bryan Drew, an attorney from Benton in southern Illinois.

Often referred to as the state’s chief fiscal officer, the state comptroller pays the state’s bills, monitors fiscal compliance, records transactions and contracts and issues reports that guide the governor and legislature on budget decisions. The office also, in one of its more obscure functions, licenses certain private cemeteries.

Margaret Croke

At a candidate forum in November at Chicago’s Rainbow PUSH headquarters, Croke described how she got her start in Cook County government at 22, fielding calls from frustrated residents puzzling over property tax bills. The experience, she said, revealed a fundamental problem in government: Information that insiders take for granted is often impenetrable to ordinary people.

“I started getting really addicted to this idea of just helping people, of trying to navigate the bureaucracy of government,” she told the crowd.

Croke has served in the Illinois House since 2021, representing a Chicago district covering parts of the North and Near North sides. She has pushed for women’s reproductive rights and, more relevant to the position of comptroller, she chairs the House Financial Institutions and Licensing Committee, which oversees financial services legislation.

If elected, Croke said she would want to improve the comptroller’s predictive financial modeling tools, revamp the vendor payment program to help businesses and nonprofits weather potential federal funding cuts and make it easier for small municipalities — often short on staff and expertise — to submit the audits required by law.

“When this office breaks down, all of state government breaks down,” she said. “It is an office where if … we don’t pay the invoices to the businesses that work with the state of Illinois, they can potentially close and never stand back up again.”

Croke entered 2026 with a commanding financial advantage over her primary opponents, ending 2025 with more than $833,000 in her campaign fund — more than her three Democratic rivals combined.

In February, Gov. JB Pritzker’s campaign contributed $72,800 to her effort, according to state campaign records. Last month, Croke also secured Pritzker’s endorsement for comptroller. Before joining the legislature, Croke worked for Pritzker as a women’s outreach director and later as a deputy chief of staff at an agency that helps secure state infrastructure funding.

Despite her history with Pritzker and his financial support of her campaign, Croke said she has “no issue as it pertains to being independent” from the governor’s office if she is elected comptroller. But that doesn’t mean she can’t be collaborative, she said.

“What I think gets conflated, though, is that independence means that you have to be combative. Independence means you have to be adversarial … That’s just not my leadership style,” she said. “I am someone who is really proud of the relationships that I’ve built. I’m someone who likes to work with people and get things done.”

Croke’s campaign has gotten money from a variety of sources, including trade and labor unions and businesses. Among them, in the last couple of years, Croke has received about $14,000 from a company called Enova International, which oversees two lending brands that were accused last month by the National Consumer Law Center of offering loans with annual percentage rates of 100% to 300%.

Asked about the donations, Croke’s campaign pointed to her support of Illinois’ 2021 Predatory Loan Prevention Act, a consumer protection measure against payday loans, as one of her first votes in office.

“Political donations don’t impact her decision-making, and she will never put her name behind a bill that is not in the best interest of Illinoisans,” a campaign spokesperson said in a statement.

Holly Kim

Kim grew up on Chicago’s Northwest Side, where her parents ran a copier and typewriter repair shop in what was once the city’s Koreatown. Her father was a technician; her mother handled the invoicing. It was, she said at the Rainbow PUSH forum, a formative education in the mechanics of making ends meet.

“His hands were always black from toner, but those hands paid the bills and put food on the table,” she said.

Kim’s path to public office was not linear. She moved to the northern suburbs, enrolled at Northeastern Illinois University back in her old neighborhood, became pregnant unexpectedly, relied for a time on Medicaid and eventually completed her degree.

“That really gave me a lens as an elected official,” she said. “As a county treasurer, my office has been the intersection of math and social justice.”

Kim, who on Monday was endorsed by Mendoza to be her successor, has served as Lake County treasurer since 2018 and sits on a banking commission overseen by the comptroller’s office. She refers to Mendoza as her “mentor.” If elected, Kim says she would press forward with technology upgrades and make cybersecurity a signature priority, noting that protecting citizens’ financial data is especially critical given the volume of checks the comptroller’s office issues.

“I literally had a relative who stole my identity and then trashed my credit to the ground. So there’s some part of me that is, like, hellbent on protecting people, their families and their money,” she said.

In her time as treasurer, her campaign has touted how in fiscal years 2023 and 2024, Kim reinvested more than $6 million of revenue generated from interest on investments in schools, parks and libraries.

But she’s also had to answer to some critics of her office who, in 2023, pointed to myriad issues. Among those were lengthy delays in publishing statutorily required reports about Lake County’s investments, which jeopardize the accuracy of the county’s fiscal standing, and Kim’s failure to ensure there was enough money in an account for an employee to cash a check.

Kim’s office a few weeks later made clear the reports were up to date, the check-cashing incident was “caused by an error in another department” and her campaign also blamed “unexpected challenges that arose” during the COVID-19 pandemic for some of the issues in the office. Separate incidents in 2020 and 2022 involved residents with autopay accounts being double-charged on property taxes — the result, Kim said in a WBBM-Ch. 2 interview, of a “coding glitch” and later “human error.” She said all of the issues have since been resolved.

Stephanie Kifowit

Kifowit’s campaign rests on a straightforward argument: two decades in government finance — as an Aurora City Council member and a state representative since 2013. She’s also worked as a financial adviser. All this, she argues, gives her a depth of experience over her rivals.

A U.S. Marine Corps veteran, Kifowit co-sponsored the 2017 Debt Transparency Act that passed the legislature following the end of the two-year budget impasse between Rauner and Democratic lawmakers. The law requires state agencies to report to the comptroller the number of outstanding bills they carry and that are subject to late-payment interest penalties. Rauner vetoed it, but the House and Senate overrode him.

“The comptroller’s office is, in my opinion, the lifeline to organizations that take care of the most vulnerable in our society, the lifeline to our schools that educate our children, and to the men and women that work for the state,” Kifowit said in an interview. “We need to make sure that the lifeline of the comptroller’s office, the flow of funds to the most vulnerable remains accurate, and (accountable), and transparent, and gets to the individuals that need it the most.”

Kifowit has shown independence as a Democratic lawmaker, voting against the current budget because, in part, she felt it did not do enough to address property tax relief and, in 2020, calling for Madigan’s resignation amid a growing federal corruption investigation, even seeking unsuccessfully to replace him as speaker. Madigan eventually resigned, was convicted on corruption charges and was sentenced to 7½  years in prison.

Her tenure has not been without controversy.

In 2018, during a House floor debate over legislation related to a deadly Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at the Quincy Veterans Home, Kifowit said she wished she could brew a Republican colleague “a broth of Legionella” and infect his family after he suggested the bill would benefit trial lawyers. She later apologized.

In the interview, Kifowit has played down the urgency of modernizing the comptroller’s office, saying improvements are already underway. She is more focused, she says, on filling vacant positions and creating mentorship pipelines to draw high school students — including those who do not plan to attend college — into careers in public finance.

Karina Villa

On a sunny day last September, Villa witnessed firsthand a swarm of federal immigration agents making their way through Chicago’s western suburbs as part of Operation Midway Blitz, a 64-day mass deportation mission.

“This is my city!” Villa shouted at apparently masked agents, according to a video of the incident. “Take off your masks! Take off your masks!”

That moment has become something of a campaign emblem for Villa, one of the legislature’s most outspoken critics of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other immigration enforcement officers. Her argument for connecting that fight to the comptroller’s office is direct: the state’s financial power is also a moral one.

“On day one, I will go through all of the contracts that we have, and if you are doing business with ICE or making profits from ICE, under my watch, you will not have a contract from the state of Illinois,” Villa told an audience at a library in northwest suburban Des Plaines last month.

That kind of aspiration is likely to require approval from the state legislature, but Villa has not wavered from that message.

A former school social worker in West Chicago and Villa Park, Villa served one term in the Illinois House before winning a state Senate seat, which she’s held since 2021. She may have a financial background that is thinner on paper than her opponents’, but she frames the comptroller’s role in broader terms.

“These political decisions of where we’re putting our dollars (are) connected,” Villa said in an interview. “How we choose to allocate them, what order we’re paying the bills in and where we’re finding more money to bring in to be able to fund the services that are getting slashed by the federal government, it’s all connected.”

Her platform emphasizes revenue: pushing corporations and the wealthy to pay more in taxes and using the comptroller’s leverage to protect safety-net hospitals that serve low-income communities.

The Republican

Drew, who faces no Republican opposition in the primary, has spent 25 years as an attorney, he says, “searching out fraud” — experience he argues qualifies him to serve as the state’s fiscal watchdog.

While acknowledging the office under Mendoza’s leadership has been paying off the state’s bills on time, he thinks it’s time for someone with “a differing viewpoint” to oversee the state’s finances considering Democrats control every statewide office.

“Right now, one party controls the budget, where the money goes, the governor, and now they want to be the one to supervise how the money’s spent,” he said. “I’m telling you, the state of Illinois needs checks and balances, and the comptroller’s office is where those checks should come in.”