As an aside, I’ve seen this happen elsewhere as well. Classic play for wage theft. When I was working as a bartender in London to make ends meet, I had a coworker from Mexico on an expired visa. Great guy and the most hardworking. Well won’t you guess it, guy got picked up by immigration authority on payday.
If you run into this again, maybe you can use pursuit of efficiency to get proof?
“If we really want to find out why, we can use a Value-stream mapping approach to analyze the process. We might even identify additional specific opportunities where we’re able to speed up!”
By documenting all steps in a process and timing each one you’d be able to identify where the difference is, and whether a critical step is being skipped. It really doesn’t have to take much time or effort. If management can’t be bothered to make that happen, then they must not really care about efficiency.