After 10 months of playing cat-and-mouse, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s closest ally in Springfield has sent to Gov. Bruce Rauner legislation giving Chicago 15 more years to ramp up to a 90 percent funding level for police and fire pensions.

Illinois Senate President John Cullerton (D-Chicago) has been holding the bill — approved by the Illinois House and Senate last spring — amid concern that Rauner would veto the legislation to squeeze cash-strapped Chicago and strengthen his own hand in the budget stalemate over the governor’s demand for pro-business, anti-union reforms.

llinois Gov. Bruce Rauner has created a task force to root out waste, fraud and abuse in taxpayer-funded health care programs.

The Republican signed an executive order to implement that group, which will also seek ways to prevent waste in state- and federally funded Medicaid and employee health insurance programs.

Rauner says the cost of state-run health care programs increases when no one watches to stop abuse and fraud. The state spends more than $19 billion a year on Medicaid and the state employee group health insurance plan.

The executive inspector general, Maggie Hickey, will head the task force. It will have 11 members, including a deputy governor, chief compliance officer, and representatives of executive departments on aging, health care and family services, state police, insurance and other agencies.

THE LOOP — Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s newly appointed interim top cop Eddie Johnson’s fiancee is a Chicago Police lieutenant named in an investigation into alleged cheating on the department’s lieutenant’s exam, DNAinfo Chicago has learned.

It’s the same cheating probe that sources said helped derail Deputy Chief Eugene Williams’ chances of being promoted to police superintendent. Now the allegations are part of a separate probe, this one by the city’s Inspector General Joe Ferguson, sources said.

Williams, one of the Chicago Police Board’s three superintendent finalists passed over by Emanuel, was a “senior subject matter expert” who helped create the most recent lieutenant’s exam. And he was the “final reviewer of potential exam content,” according to the Police Department’s Feb. 17 response to a Freedom of Information Act request obtained by DNAinfo Chicago.

In his unsuccessful 2014 bid for re-election, then-Gov. Pat Quinn vowed that sweeping changes had cleaned up an unwieldy anti-violence program, but new findings show that widespread problems persisted for two years longer than previously known.

The findings emerged in a “confidential draft” the Tribune obtained of a new, highly critical audit — nearing release — that focuses on a high-profile issue in the last gubernatorial election.

According to the draft, the state auditor general’s office found that bread-and-butter grant protocol was abandoned, leading to sketchy oversight riddled with missing documentation, questionable spending, unclear results and unspent money yet to be returned to state coffers. In one case, auditors discovered, a private agency filed for bankruptcy less than four months after getting more than $583,000 in state money.

State lawmakers are confronting what has become a common problem in the digital age: How to provide law enforcement with the tools to investigate online threats and cybercrimes while also making sure privacy and free speech are safeguarded.

Lawmakers are considering a series of new bills aimed at giving police more power to investigate online crimes and also to tap into technology to hold people accountable for posting video of crimes.

One measure would ban juveniles charged with a crime from having access to their social media accounts. In addition, those individuals would be required to turn over access to their accounts to police.

Illinois’ overall financial condition deteriorated in fiscal 2015 as tax collections fell, with the state recording its fourteenth straight budget deficit, according to an annual audit released on Tuesday.

The nation’s fifth-largest state ended fiscal 2015 on June 30 with a general fund deficit that grew to $6.9 billion from $6.7 billion in fiscal 2014, the comprehensive annual financial report by Illinois Auditor General Frank Mautino showed. A temporary income tax hike enacted in 2011 partially expired midway through fiscal 2015, decreasing collections by $1.8 billion.

“The state continues to show an inability to generate sufficient cash from its current revenue structure to pay operating expenditures on a timely basis,” the audit said.