ELIZABETH, N.J. – Legal work is a necessary expense for school districts.

Expensive, but necessary.

MORE NEWS: From Classroom to Consulate Chef: Culinary Student Lands Dream Job at U.S. Embassy in Paris

But the high cost of attorneys is a very good reason for school officials to keep a close eye on legal bills, to make sure taxpayers don’t get charged any more than necessary.

That apparently didn’t happen in the Elizabeth, New Jersey school district in 2011.

The district hired the law firm Pasham Stein Walder Hayden that year to work on six projects, according to a report from NJ.com. But the district may have ended up paying $1 million more for those projects than it should have, according to an audit.

Three lead attorneys from the firm were contracted to work for rates of $500, $425 and $400 per hour, the news report said.

But several other attorneys from the firm who were not under contract also did work for the school district, and billed the for rates ranging between $175 and $400.

The Elizabeth district usually pays attorneys $165 per hour.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

The higher rates for the three lead attorneys was budgeted, but the extra money paid for the other attorneys apparently was not.

That led to a much bigger legal bill than the district anticipated. Amazingly, the alleged overpayment was apparently not discovered by the school board until an audit presentation last June.

“Had the district been billed for all the attorneys at $165 an hour, except for those three lead attorneys that were approved specifically (at higher rates), the district would have been billed $1,069,218 less than what it actually paid,” auditor Deiter Lerch was quoted as saying by NJ.com.

Apparently spending issues in the Elizabeth district are not limited to questionable legal bills.

“Lerch (the auditor) in his presentation also questioned $110,000 in unemployment benefits paid to more than 20 people during the summer of 2015,” the news report said. “All of those people had been employed by the district before then, he said, and most were still employed the following fall. Many were tenured.”

While the news report didn’t explicitly say so, the obvious implication is that the employees who collected those benefits may not have been entitled.

Perhaps the taxpayers of the Elizabeth school district should be paying closer attention to where their money is going, because there is reason to believe that the people who run the district are not.