Sadly, for programmers in the US, overtime is essentially always unpaid. When you e.g. hear about game developers doing 80hr/week crunch time, they're not getting paid extra for that.
I get that, but 'unsanctioned overtime' sounds as if the company was robbed of something. Since they never paid for that 'overtime', how did it need to be sanctioned?
Going that route, maybe the company could pay for the work done on the project.
