Chicago's new mayor announced Thursday that the city has hired multinational claims management company Gallagher Bassett to straighten out the city's troubled workers' compensation program.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot

Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who took office less than a month ago, said the company was hired after a competitive bid process and will begin administering almost $300 million in open claims, the Chicago Sun-Times reported today.

The development is the latest for the city's workers' comp program, which for decades was managed by Alderman Ed Burke. Burke stepped down from the job this year after he was indicted on unrelated charges. The comp program has been called a jobs and patronage vehicle that had not been audited for years.

The City Council this year moved oversight out of its purview and into the mayor's office, and Lightfoot has pledged to clean up the program.

“The system that Ed Burke ran was ripe for corruption,” Lightfoot said at a news conference Thursday. “We’re gonna learn more about that as we dig into the details of these old legacy claims. But what we’re trying to do now is establish a bright line that Chicago is actually gonna come into the modern age that is consistent with best practices across the country.”

Chicago may have been the only major city in the country to have its compensation program managed by the legislative branch, and that led to a fiefdom with no transparency and rife with abuse, many have said.

“A system of this size and significance has no business being controlled by a single member of the City Council — not to mention controlled without meaningful oversight, controls or transparency,” Lightfoot said, promising more supervision by Inspector General Joe Ferguson and the City Council.

“While other cities across the country have long ago reformed and professionalized their own programs, here in Chicago, we continued to operate in such an opaque and antiquated manner that even members of our own City Council didn’t know how the program worked. That all ends now,” the mayor said, according to the news report.

Gallagher Basset provides workers' compensation claims management in almost every U.S. state and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, according to its website. Company officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.