Illinois, on the cusp of entering its second year without a state budget, counts among its many unpaid bills one that threatens to provoke a dispute with the nation's top crime-fighting force.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act show that Illinois owes $3 million to the FBI for processing fingerprints and conducting background checks. The debt is now so long overdue that it could be turned over to the federal government's collection agency — the Treasury Department.

The delinquent payment is just latest unexpected consequence to emerge from a stalemate between the Republican governor and Democrats controlling the Legislature. The impasse has left Illinois without a budget since July 1 and exacerbated a long-running problem of bills piling up. As of Tuesday, the state had more than $7 billion in unpaid bills.

"The breadth of the issues covered by the budget impasse never ceases to amaze me," said Rep. Elaine Nekritz, a Democrat from the Chicago suburb of Northbrook and chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee on civil matters.

Gov. Bruce Rauner is holding out for changes in law to cut business costs and restrict the power of labor unions. Democrats say consideration of Rauner's plans to limit worker's compensation payments, crimp collective bargaining, adopt term limits and create a balanced method for drawing political districts should wait until after lawmakers have tamed a multibillion-dollar deficit through spending cuts and tax increases.

The fingerprinting money has already been set aside. There's nearly $19 million in an account called the State Police Services Fund, which is used to pay for FBI fingerprint expertise. But without a legislative appropriation, no one has any authority to spend the money.

The FBI says states rarely fall more than four months behind in payments, but it has never cut services, and it has not stopped examining Illinois fingerprints.

A spokesman for the agency's Criminal Justice Information Service, Stephen Fischer, said the agency is exploring "alternative collection and processing options" to continue providing services to Illinois without going deeper into debt.

He did not elaborate, but Ken Zercie, a vice president of the International Association of Identification, said options could include federal grants or assistance from other agencies to fill the gap.

Zercie, who retired as laboratory director for the Connecticut Department of Public Safety, said the importance of gathering fingerprints and verifying identity and criminal histories means it's a safe bet that the Justice Department won't shut the door on Illinois.

"That would be kind of illogical given the state of everything," Zercie said. "It's a public-safety issue."

This isn't the first time the budget crisis has caused headaches for law enforcement. The AP reported in April that the secretary of state's police force had to carry cash from driver's license facilities for four months after an armored-truck company stopped work until it got paid.

The FBI processes 260,000 sets of Illinois fingerprints annually in criminal background checks for those seeking jobs such as school bus driver or private detective or applying for permits to carry concealed firearms or cultivate medicinal marijuana.

Illinois' last fingerprint payment to the FBI was for $313,000 on July 23 to cover costs for June — the final month of the previous fiscal year, according to state records.

One of the oldest forms of scientific identification, fingerprinting remains the most reliable, and the FBI has 90 million sets of prints on file, said Charles Walsh, a New Hampshire private forensic consultant who began a 30-year FBI career as a fingerprint technician in 1968. Today, the agency processes 3 million fingerprints a day, Walsh said.

But even with ever-improving technology, examination is still a costly, labor-intensive process.

While it takes just 3.4 seconds to electronically scan fingerprints and match them to those on file with a 98 percent degree of accuracy, the results could still produce as many as 20 possible matches, Walsh said.

"It's still a human technician who has to make the identification," he said. "That's where your money is going."