Remember all the way back in 2023, during the height of the migrant influx, when Tribune reporting uncovered that a city contractor running operations at migrant shelters was submitting some eye-popping bills?

During one week in March of that year, the majority of Favorite Staffing workers at city migrant shelters logged 84-hour workweeks, according to examined invoices. That meant their staff was working 12-hour days, seven days a week. Extraordinarily, logs for one worker reported they worked five 12-hour shifts, a 14-hour shift and a 16-hour shift one week that March. Favorite Staffing billed the city $15,525 for that worker alone. For one week!

We had no evidence of fraud. What we did have was a hard time understanding how such a hefty percentage of their workers were logging those kinds of highly unusual hours. Back then, we called for an audit to make sure everything was on the up and up.

Now, the state of Illinois finds itself in a tricky situation of its own with Favorite Staffing.

A report from Illinois Auditor General Christopher Meister released Tuesday revealed that the state paid Favorite $78.5 million for workers on standby. Meaning: not actively working.

Favorite billed Illinois for 469,892 hours of standby under a state contract for COVID pandemic response work.

That standby pay accounted for 36% of a total bill worth $220.3 million during the audit period covering fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Unsurprisingly, the auditor general’s analysis found that the state’s recordkeeping and contract oversight was inadequate.

To be fair, the mere existence of “stand down” pay doesn’t prove taxpayers were ripped off. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency notes that during major disasters, emergency personnel routinely are paid to remain ready for deployment even when they aren’t actively working. That’s reasonable.

What’s much harder to defend is what came next in Meister’s report: IEMA couldn’t document that it had analyzed how many contractors it actually needed. It didn’t require standardized contractor timesheets. It lacked an approval process for overtime, and it didn’t ensure vendors adequately supported their invoices before the state paid them.

Separately in their analysis, auditors estimated that we paid one contractor more than $1.4 million for housing of contractual staffers — who were “housed in personal residences instead of hotels.”

Vendors also racked up an extreme amount of costly overtime. Nine of the 28 IEMA-Office of Homeland Security contracts auditors reviewed from fiscal years 2022 and 2023 allowed contractors to bill higher overtime rates. In one instance, one vendor billed $88.4 million in overtime. Another vendor, which wasn’t authorized to charge extra for overtime, billed 644,653 hours beyond the established minimum 40- or 60-hour workweek requirements. IEMA had no approval process in place governing those extra hours.

All of this comes with a caveat, of course. Illinois was operating under extraordinary circumstances during COVID, and later during the migrant influx. Governments needed to move quickly. But “emergency” cannot become a magic word that suspends ordinary stewardship of public money, particularly when hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing through outside contractors.

Meister’s recommendations ultimately come down to making sure the state has processes in place for striking better deals for taxpayers.

The idea is that Illinois should build the financial controls now, before everybody is scrambling.

Given the auditor general’s findings, we’d go a step further: The state should apply this kind of targeted scrutiny more broadly to outside contractors doing business with Illinois. There’s no reason to believe the weaknesses the auditor general found are unique to IEMA, and taxpayers shouldn’t have to wait for another crisis — or the subsequent audit — to find out.

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