AI still pays bounty after Pirates destroyed

Not sure if this has been talked about before or not, but it's happened in several single player games for me. 

After I go in and wipe out the pirates, the AI still pays bounty even though there are no pirates to pay.  Not that I'm all that upset about the AI wasting credits on that rather than buying new ships or improving their planets, but it seems a bit silly.  I would think a simple line of code inserted in the bounty routine to check and see if the pirates are dead or not before sending credits would fix it.