Gov. Maura Healey’s administration approved “improper and unlawful” no-bid contracts for food and transportation services as part of the state-run emergency shelter system housing migrants and local families, according to a report released Tuesday by the State Auditor’s Office.

The scathing audit from Auditor Diana DiZoglio hammered the Healey administration for a series of decisions it made around procurement and contracting in the early stages of a surge of migrant arrivals to Massachusetts that strained the taxpayer-funded family shelter system.

But the report focused on some incidents that have already faced waves of scrutiny in the media and public criticism, including two no-bid contracts Healey inked with East Boston’s Spinelli’s Ravioli and Mercedes Cab Company in North Truro.

DiZoglio said she hopes the Healey administration adopts the reforms her office recommended in the audit and moves “away from its defensive posture.”

“This is an opportunity for the administration to reevaluate how it can and must be a more responsible steward of its significant authorities during states of emergency. The audit shines a light on where efficiencies and improvements should be implemented to help save taxpayer dollars and increase public trust,” the auditor said in a statement.

Housing Secretary Ed Augustus shot back at DiZoglio, arguing her audit “misses the urgent need for reform to the flawed system we inherited, the scale of the crisis that was thrust upon Massachusetts during this time, and the magnitude of the turnaround that has occurred.”

“The SAO’s suggestion that its own performance auditors could have predicted a once-in-a-lifetime surge in shelter demand — when shelter system operators throughout the country did not — is surprising to say the least,” Augustus said in a letter to DiZoglio. “EOHLC strongly rejects the suggestion that it should have foreseen what was, in fact, a historically unprecedented increase in demand for EA shelter services driven by international and national forces far beyond EOHLC’s control.”

The report also drew criticism from some shelter providers like Heading Home CEO Danielle Ferrier, who knocked the investigation as a “desk audit.”

“The team conducting this audit did not speak with any providers. The methodology appears flawed. The report contains factually incorrect assertions about the process that lead to inaccurate conclusions,” Ferrier said in a statement to the Herald.

The number of families in state-run shelters started to increase in January 2023 but spiked toward the end of the year, according to historical state data. Caseloads mostly plateaued during 2024 before they started to decline at the beginning of this year.

Healey declared a state of emergency in August 2023, a move that allowed her administration to use no-bid or “emergency contracts” to quickly find services while competitive procurement processes played out in the background.

DiZoglio’s office accused Healey’s housing deputies of failing to “adequately assess and act upon the increased demand for service, resulting in improper and unlawful emergency procurements for food and transportation.”

The report contends that the emergency shelter system had already surpassed “baseline capacity” of 3,600 units by January 2023, and the situation continued to worsen throughout the remainder of the year.

“We believe that EOHLC could have better foreseen the increased demand for food and transportation services based upon data it was tracking and made use of the normal procurement process instead,” the audit said.

DiZoglio’s office said even though shelter caseloads had been climbing since the start of 2023, the Healey administration went ahead and entered into four no-bid contracts, including the $10 million agreement with Spinell’s and a $2.8 million deal with Mercedes Cab Company.

The housing agency “provided us no valid justification for the no-bid emergency contracts,” the audit said.

“The situation was not unexpected, and the need for food and transportation services had been predictable well before the emergency procurement was initiated,” the report said, which also criticized the no-bid deals as “inordinately long and inconsistent with best practices.”

Augustus said the no-bid contracts the administration agreed to addressed “critical unmet needs for food and transportation for families and children.”

For a limited period of time, he said, the state placed families in hotels without immediate shelter service providers to serve food or provide transportation to shelter residents.

The Healey administration looked to Spinelli’s for food in part because it was an existing Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency contractor that provided services during the COVID-19 pandemic under former Gov. Charlie Baker’s administration, Augustus said.

“EOHLC executed the contract with Spinelli’s on an emergency basis because allowing hundreds of families and children sheltered in hotels to go without access to food was rightly determined to be an unacceptable alternative,” Augustus said.

The former Worcester city manager said the state turned to Mercedes Cab Company, now known as Pilgrim Transit, because it needed “specialized transportation services.”

“The cost that EOHLC paid was proportionate to the difficulty of the required work. EOHLC required statewide, on-demand transportation services by a vendor able to scale. Transportation services had to be guaranteed to be available between 8 am and 6 pm, Monday to Saturday,” Augustus said.

After an unrelated event Tuesday, Healey said she did not think her administration would make changes to their procedures based on the report from DiZoglio’s office.

“This has been territory pretty well covered. We, as a team, spent a lot of time on it the last two years. I instituted a number of reforms along the way. I then worked with the Legislature on important reforms, and that’s why you see things today where numbers are way down, costs are going way down, hotels are shutting down,” Healey said.

But Healey still took flak from two potential Republican rivals in next year’s 2026 gubernatorial election in which she plans to run for a second term.

Mike Kennealy, a former cabinet secretary under Baker, said DiZoglio’s report “confirmed what we already knew.”

“Maura Healey completely mismanaged the migrant crisis, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer’s hard earned dollars on bloated no-bid contracts while refusing to act early and responsibly,” he said. “Massachusetts needs a governor who can manage a crisis and respects taxpayers enough to protect their dollars from misappropriation.”

Brian Shortsleeve, a venture capitalist and former MBTA official, called on Healey to fire Augustus, arguing the audit showed a “systemic problem of carelessness with our tax dollars.”

“Where do we go to get our money back from these pricey no-bid contracts?” Shortsleeve said. “Healey’s team blew millions on shady, no-bid contracts, handed out sweetheart deals, and got taken for a ride, literally, with $150 cab fares and bloated food bills.”