WWYD- contractor pay situation

We don't have staff, we have contractors that we work with. The contractors are given work according to their skills and availability.

We had a busy September and required another contractor so we were recommended one guy who was really nice but turned out to be a complete waste of money. He hasn't been working for a couple of years so was very desperate for money and I don't know if that contributed to the amount of time he spent on some jobs, or if it was the brain surgery he had to undergo.

For example, he spent nine hours doing something that should have taken him one hour, and he didn't communicate that he was having difficulties for us to make the call then to take him off the job. We also asked for a solution at one site, four hours pay later he says no first we must do this before we can do that. We paid him literal thousands that month, 99% of it was advance payment because he needed the money, and we couldn't invoice a cent of it (it was work done for SLA clients, we normally spend little time on them because we can't bill separately).

Anyway, we decided for October we would only use him if needed, and it hasn't been needed. Even the contractor who recommended him conceded he wasn't ready for work again.

We have no formal contracts in place, so no obligations. But he's been popping up a lot lately asking to be forward paid for work... But there a)is no work and b) we're not even sure we're going to ever use him again.

He reached out again today asking to be forward paid two hours work and while I feel very sorry for him and his situation, we can't *just* give people money. Especially when we're a recovering business ourself.

My human side though is like saying we can probably afford a couple of hundred bucks, my boss side is saying how can we pay someone who hasn't even done anything and who ripped us off last month.

What would you do?

*Thank you all. Just to clarify, we've told him several times during the course of the month that there's currently no work for him, in fact the month has been so bad we as the bosses haven't even been able to get our full, or even half, salaries (and he is aware of this too, the extent of how quiet it is). He wants to do proactive work but we frankly can't afford to just pay someone to look for problems.