Illinois TIF annual report: deadline, attachments and common problems

If you run the TIF books for an Illinois municipality, you file one annual report per district with the Illinois Comptroller. This page covers when it is due, what goes in it, and the gaps worth checking before you upload. Last checked October 13, 2026.

When it is due

The default due date is 180 days after the end of the municipality's fiscal year. The statute is 65 ILCS 5/11-74.4-5(d); the Comptroller's TIF upload instructions describe how the date works in practice. Two things can push it later: if the audit is completed after the 180-day date, the due date is the day the audit became available to the municipality, and a joint review board meeting that falls after the 180-day date can also set it.

These are counted from fiscal year ends in 2025. A leap day inside the 180 days moves the later ones by a day, so count from your own year end.

The step that gets fined is easy to miss. In the portal you first answer preliminary questions about the audit date, the joint review board meeting and whether the district has terminated. According to the instructions, not finishing those by the default due date makes the report delinquent, and uploading after the due date also starts fines.

What goes in the report

The Comptroller's template has eight sections. Section 3 is split into three parts.

• Section 1. Identifies the municipality and the TIF district.
• Section 2. The compliance checklist: a yes or no for each of the 15 lettered attachments.
• Section 3.1. Revenue into the special tax allocation fund, split across the 11 revenue categories on the form.
• Section 3.2. Expenditures against the 18 statutory cost categories (3.2A), plus vendors paid more than $10,000 (3.2B).
• Section 3.3. Debt obligations and project costs still to be paid, which is how the form tells committed money apart from surplus.
• Section 4. Property the municipality acquired.
• Section 5. Projects and the private to public investment ratio.
• Section 6. Jobs and investment by project for the fiscal year.
• Section 7. The district boundary: a description, or the legal description and map marked as enclosed.
• Section 8. Equalized assessed value and the overlapping taxing districts.

Section 2 points to lettered attachments, A through O:

• Attachment A. Amendments, enactments or extensions to the redevelopment plan, project area or State Sales Tax Boundary.
• Attachment B. CEO certification of compliance with the Act. Required every year.
• Attachment C. Opinion of legal counsel that the municipality is in compliance with the Act. Required every year.
• Attachment D. Statement of activities undertaken in furtherance of the redevelopment plan.
• Attachment E. Agreements about the disposition or redevelopment of property in the project area.
• Attachment F. Additional information on the use of all funds received.
• Attachment G. TIF advisor or consultant contracts with entities receiving TIF-financed payments.
• Attachment H. Reports submitted to the municipality by the joint review board.
• Attachment I. Official Statement for any obligations the municipality issued.
• Attachment J. Financial advisor or underwriter analysis of the obligation terms and debt service.
• Attachment K. Audited financial statements of the special tax allocation fund.
• Attachment L. Independent CPA letter on compliance with subsection (q) of 11-74.4-3.
• Attachment M. List of intergovernmental agreements currently in effect (a list only).
• Attachment N. Third-party-verified developer stated rate of return.
• Attachment O. Letter from the Mayor or Village President designating the TIF administrator. Required every year.

Labels follow the FY2026 template as TIF Nexus has it encoded. The statute citations for each attachment are in 65 ILCS 5/11-74.4-5(d); read the statute and the current template before you rely on any one line.

What to check before you upload

The Comptroller's instructions do not publish a list of reasons a report gets sent back, so this is not that list. These are the gaps that TIF Nexus's pre-filing check treats as stoppers, because each leaves a required part of the form empty or contradicts itself:

• The attachment checklist was never started. If nobody has gone through Section 2, you cannot tell whether the mandatory attachments are in hand.
• A mandatory attachment (B, C or O) is not marked complete. These are the three the template requires on every filing.
• Attachment I is enclosed but Attachment J is not. An Official Statement is supposed to travel with the financial advisor's analysis of the terms (65 ILCS 5/11-74.4-5(d)(8)(B)).
• Cumulative TIF revenue has passed $100,000 and K and L are not in the packet. Audited financial statements (K) and the independent CPA letter (L) apply once cumulative revenue for the district reaches $100,000 (65 ILCS 5/11-74.4-5(d)(2) and (d)(9)). The flag on the district is easy to leave stale, so compare it to the revenue you actually recorded.
• Section 7 is empty. No boundary description, no legal description marked enclosed, no map.
• Section 8 lists no overlapping taxing districts. Most districts overlap at least a county and a school district, so a blank Section 8 is usually an omission.
• Section 3.3 was not carried forward. An earlier year still designated money to a bond or project cost that this year does not list, so the ending balance reads as surplus owed to the taxing districts.

It also raises softer warnings, such as an attachment marked complete with nothing on file, expenditures with no supporting document, a missing EAV for the year, and a joint review board that met before the report was filed. Those will not stop an upload, but they are what an auditor asks about.

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