Show Us the Money

And this money - unlike the usual owed cash - is accruing interest:

• Chicago's budget crisis may be worse than many had thought.

  A still-pending lawsuit over police overtime pay could put the city on the hook for $200 million. It's a liability Chicago City Council members recently learned about as the city heads into budget season.

  [...] In 2015, several police officers filed suit in what is now a class action case against the city, alleging officers were not properly paid for the overtime they worked.

  "It's pretty basic, and it's almost unbelievable that it happened, so the city used two systems to track an officer's time," said Will Aitchison, an attorney for the officers. "One for overtime from extended shifts, and another for when cops worked special details, and the systems were not integrated... In a court filing a year ago, the plaintiffs estimated the overtime backpay due the officers exceeded $200 million, a figure the city disputed in the filing."

  Right now, there are no settlement talks underway and none are planned. The officers' attorney says if that doesn't change, this case could drag on for another three years.

This has mainly to do with FLSA overtime - time in excess of the federally "permitted" total hours that are paid at the regular rate. Anything in excess of the "permitted" hours is paid at the higher FLSA rate, occasionally amounting to something between $4-to-7 dollars-per-hour (depending on grade). 

Very lucrative for those who worked every single day off and every single OT initiative the City offered to hide the manpower shortages that were becoming evident even before 2015. But the Department and City were miscalculating or deliberately misrecording hours into different columns on the time cards depending on which pool of money they were draining at the time.

They're going to fight this tooth-and-nail, because the money isn't there.