The Man Who Counts

We're Just Getting Started

Mike Burkhold — Fri, 13 Nov 2026 12:03:35 GMT

Last week South Carolina elected me Comptroller General. Thank you.

Sometimes a candidate wants your attention right up until Election Day. Then he wins, and you don’t hear from him again until he needs your vote. I’m not going to do that. Show Me the Money keeps going.

The job starts in January. The Comptroller General keeps the state’s books: what came in, what went out, and what is left. So in January I stop reading those books from the outside and start keeping them.

Here is what I plan to do with that. We’re going to put the state’s spending online where anybody can read it. And I’ll keep making these videos, one piece of the budget at a time.

The legislature writes the budget and decides how the money is spent. My job is to see that the legislature and you have the right numbers.

I also want to hear from you. If you see state spending that doesn’t add up, send it to me at questions@burkhold.net. We may look into it on the show. My team is also working on a way for you to send information about waste, fraud and abuse without giving your name. I’ll update you as that comes together.

It was your money first. We’re just getting started.

You Did the Hiring - Thank you

Mike Burkhold — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 21:40:44 GMT

Yesterday South Carolina did the hiring. You elected me to be your next SC Comptroller General. Thank you.

Thank you to everyone who voted, for me or for someone else. The office keeps one set of books for the whole state. I will keep them the same way for everybody.

The Comptroller General keeps the state’s books: what came in, what went out, and what is left. I asked for your vote so I could count your money the way you counted it when it was yours and put the count where you can read it. You said yes. Now I owe you the work.

The job starts in January. As I begin, I will be learning the office from the people who work there. They know those books better than I do, so I will start by listening.

The legislature writes the budget and decides how the money is spent. My job is to see that the legislature and you have the right numbers, on time, in words everyone can understand. When my office gets a number wrong, you will hear it from us.

I look forward to working with Governor-elect Alan Wilson to root out waste and fraud. That work starts with books that are right, because you cannot find what you cannot count.

I will keep writing to you here, one state document at a time, with the page number, so you can check my work.

The money in the state’s books was yours first, and it still is. South Carolina is a great state that can be the best-run in the country. You did your part yesterday. In January I start on mine.

Your Vote Counts. Go Vote Today.

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:01:26 GMT

South Carolina’s budget this year is $42.7 billion.1 Every dollar of it is decided in rooms most of us will never sit in.

Part of that money was ours first. It came out of our paychecks before we saw it, and it was added at the register when we shopped. From there, other people make the decisions. Legislators write the budget, agencies spend it, and one office keeps the books.

We have our own lives to run, so we hire people to sit in those rooms for us. Today is the day we do the hiring.

The voting booth is the one room where you make the decision yourself. Your vote counts.

One of the jobs on your ballot is Comptroller General. The Comptroller General keeps the state’s books: what came in, what went out, and what is left. I’m Mike Burkhold. I am asking for your vote so I can count your money the way you counted it when it was yours and put the count where you can read it.

The polls are open from 7 this morning until 7 tonight. Bring your photo ID. You can find your polling place at scvotes.gov. If you have already voted, thank you. Send this to someone who has not.

South Carolina is a great state that can be the best-run in the country. You watched every dollar when it was yours. Today you decide who watches it next.

Next week: Our Next Steps

Last week: [Substack embedded preview card: Three Things My Office Will Do in Its First Year, October 27]

H.5126, the FY2026-27 General Appropriations Act as ratified August 11, 2026 (R.276; Act 259 of 2026), Part IA, Recapitulation, Source of Funds, page 265: grand total $42,693,837,462, made up of $13,989,981,021 in general funds, $14,036,525,486 in federal funds, and $14,667,330,955 in other funds. These are the amounts the act appropriates for the year that began July 1, 2026. They are not amounts spent.

Three Things My Office Will Do in Its First Year

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:02:45 GMT

For ten years, South Carolina’s yearly financial report said the state had more cash in its main account than it had. When the number was fixed in 2022, it was off by $3.5 billion.1 No money was missing. The report was wrong.

The Comptroller General’s office prepares that report. It is the office I am asking you for.

The state’s auditors told the office that its checks on its own work were weak. They said so in ten of the eleven years from 2012 through 2022.2 A leader does not let a known problem sit.

The office wanted South Carolina to be the first state to publish its report.3 The man who was Comptroller General then later testified that he had held his staff to strict deadlines, and that the mistake might have been caught sooner if he had given them more time.4 A leader would rather be right than first.

There had been talk about trouble with the cash figures before. Nobody settled whether anything was wrong. The office’s own timeline says the talks “went back and forth with no conclusive determination of a problem.” When the mistake was confirmed, the Comptroller General called it a “long standing riddle.”5 A leader insists that a riddle in the state’s numbers gets solved, not kicked down the road.

The office’s staff confirmed the mistake on October 17, 2022, and told the state’s auditors ten days later. Its meetings to alert elected officials began seven weeks after it knew.6 By then the 2022 report, the one with the fix in it, was out.

At the front of that report is a letter from the Comptroller General addressed “To the Citizens, Governor and Members of the South Carolina General Assembly.” The letter does not mention the mistake. It does mention a national award for the prior year’s report, the thirty-fourth in a row. The prior year’s report was one of the ten that were wrong. The fix is in a note that begins on page 146.7 A Senate panel later found that the chairman of the Senate’s budget committee “was not directly informed” until a hearing the next February.8 A leader is up front when something is wrong.

This was not simply an accounting failure. It was a total leadership failure.

If your bank got your balance wrong for ten years and did not write to tell you, you would move your money. You do not get that choice with the state. Your taxes come out of your paycheck before you see them.

The chapter of state law on the Comptroller General has twenty sections. None says who must be told when the office finds a mistake in its own work, or how soon.9 When the law doesn’t say, it comes down to who is running the office.

The office has since built a log to track its errors. The copy of the 2022 report on the office’s website now has a notice of the fix on its cover.10

If I am elected Comptroller General, I will make changes in three areas: accountability, transparency and efficiency. The office will start with three changes in its first year, one in each area.

The first is accountability. It starts with me. I will not ignore a problem once the office knows it exists. I will insist that it be found and resolved, because a problem left alone grows. I will hold the staff, the agencies and myself to accurate financials. That means giving the staff the time to get them right. When we are wrong, you will hear it from us. If my office finds a mistake large enough to change the state’s financial report, it will say so in writing to the Governor, the Treasurer, the legislature’s two budget chairmen and the public. It will not wait for the yearly report to come out.

The second is transparency. I went looking for one page that shows how much money the state’s agencies are holding and what it is for. I could not find one. The answer is spread across one report and more than 100 separate files. No page adds them up.11 My office will put it all in one report. Every agency, what it is holding, and what the money is for. We will keep it current every month and post it where anybody can read it.

The third is efficiency. Money an agency has not spent by June 30 normally goes back to be budgeted again. Last year state agencies kept $3.12 billion of it and carried it into this year.12 Some of that money is spoken for, and it should be. A road takes more than one year to build. Before you go to the grocery store, you look in the pantry. When next year’s budget requests come in, my office will publish what each agency is already holding, right next to what it is asking for. I will work with the legislature so the people who vote on the budget see that page before they vote.

Some of this depends on the state’s accounting system. If the accounting system doesn’t hold a detail yet, I’ll work to see that it does.

None of this changes who decides. The legislature writes the budget. The legislature decides how the money is spent. My job is to see that the legislature and you have the right numbers, on time, in words everyone can understand.

The money in the state’s books was yours first. You earned it, so you keep track of every dollar you have left. The state owes you the same count on its end, and a letter with a plan and timeline to fix it if the count is wrong. South Carolina is a great state that can be the best-run in the country. That starts with books you can trust. Keeping them takes leadership. That is the job I am asking you for.

Next week: Its voting day! Go Vote!

Last week:

State of South Carolina, Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2022, Note 15, pages 146 to 147. The “main account” is the General Fund as accounting rules define it, not the Budgetary General Fund. The table on page 146 restates the General Fund’s beginning fund equity from $10,630,392,000 to $7,100,560,000, an “Error Correction” of $3,529,832,000. Page 147: “Until being discovered in 2022, this mapping error impacted the ACFRs for fiscal years 2012 through 2021, overstating General Fund cash and fund equity in those ACFRs by a cumulative amount of $3.530 billion,” and “It had no impact on the State’s actual cash or on the State’s annual appropriation and budgeting process.” AlixPartners, State Treasury Forensic Accounting Review, Final Report, January 15, 2025, page 46: the $3.530 billion is the net of three errors, an overstatement of $5,899,197,555 and understatements of $1,852,455,573 and $516,909,503; page 11 confirms the net amount.

Constitutional Subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee, Report on the Investigation of the FY2022 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report Restatement, March 15, 2023, report page 4: the State Auditor and the outside audit firm “noted that weakness in internal controls was a recurring concern in their audits of the Office over the last 10 years. The State Auditor informed the Comptroller General of these concerns in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.”

AlixPartners final report (note 1), page 39: the Comptroller General then in office “often demanded that his team exceed the timing requirements of the GFOA, aiming to be the first state to issue its ACFR. The CGO staff commented that these deadlines often placed unnecessary pressure on the team.” The same page lists the release dates of the 2015 through 2021 reports, all between November 12 and December 12.

Senate report (note 2), page 10: the Comptroller General “testified that he was responsible for subjecting his staff to strict deadlines, and speculated the error would have been intercepted sooner had he allotted them more time.”

Office of the Comptroller General, “Timeline for Events Addressing ACFR Cash Restatement,” given to the Senate subcommittee on February 16, 2023 and printed in its report at pages 17 to 24, entry for 10/17/2022: “There had been prior discussions of difficulties encountered in connection with ACFR cash reporting, but they went back and forth with no conclusive determination of a problem.” Senate report, page 8, citing an email of October 27, 2022: the Comptroller General “referred to the restatement error as a ‘long standing riddle.’”

Same timeline. Entry for 10/17/2022: “A problem with the reporting of cash in the ACFR was conclusively determined to exist.” Entry for 10/27/2022: “Met with the State Auditor’s Office and the External Auditors to inform them of the problem we had discovered.” Entry for 12/5/2022: “The express purpose of the meetings beginning on December 5 was to ... alert elected officials and Senior Staff from several agencies regarding the significant re-statement found in Note 15 of the ACFR.” October 17 to December 5 is 49 days.

FY2022 report (note 1). The letter of transmittal runs pages 6 to 10 and is dated November 29, 2022. The letter was read in full; the words “error,” “restate,” “correct” and “Note 15” do not appear in it. Page 10 of the letter: the Government Finance Officers Association “awarded a Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting to the State of South Carolina for its Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR) for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2021. This was the thirty-fourth consecutive year that the State of South Carolina achieved this recognition.” Note 15 lists fiscal year 2021 among the years the error affected. Elsewhere in the report, the auditors’ report points to Note 15 under “Emphasis of Matter” on page 19, and a table footnote on page 27 does the same.

Senate report (note 2), page 7: "the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee was not directly informed of the restatement prior to the February 9th budget hearing." The same page finds that the Comptroller General "knew of the issue at least as early as October 2022, but did not inform appropriate State leaders until December 2022."

S.C. Code Title 11, Chapter 3, “Comptroller General,” as posted at scstatehouse.gov and read October 6, 2026: twenty sections, 11-3-10 through 11-3-240. The words “error” and “notify” do not appear in the chapter. Part IB of this year’s budget, H.5126 as ratified, was also searched and has no proviso on the subject. Not reviewed: the rest of Title 11, federal securities disclosure rules, and the office’s internal policies.

Forvis Mazars, S.253 Final Report, March 9, 2026, page 28, recommendation AP-11: the office “developed a Materiality Policy and related Error Tracking and Reporting Log,” both “expected to be put into use during the FY 2026 ACFR development process.” The copy of the FY2022 report posted at cg.sc.gov, downloaded October 6, 2026, carries a notice above the cover title that begins “See Note 15 of the 2022 ACFR, which describes the correction of a multi-year error.”

Office of the Comptroller General, year-end report, August 18, 2026: every schedule is headed “Budgetary General Fund.” The Department of Administration’s Executive Budget Office posts the Other Funds Surveys required by S.C. Code § 2-65-20(1) at admin.sc.gov/services/budget/building-budget/other-funds-surveys, one PDF for each agency, each with a Year End Cash Balance for every fund; the page lists more than 100 and carries no total.

Year-end report (note 11), "Budgetary General Fund, Appropriations and Expenditures, Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2026 (Unaudited)," report page 4, Total line: appropriations carried forward to 2027, $3,123,389,420. Budgetary General Fund only.

South Carolina law says the State Auditor shall audit every state agency every year. For fiscal year 2024, 51 agencies got something called agreed-upon procedures instead.

Mike Burkhold — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 11:03:31 GMT

South Carolina law says the State Auditor shall audit every state agency every year. For fiscal year 2024, 51 agencies got something called agreed-upon procedures instead.

In an audit, the auditor decides what to test and signs an opinion on whether the books are right. In agreed-upon procedures, the agency agrees to a list of items. The auditor checks those items, reports what turned up, and gives no opinion at the end. The State Auditor’s letters say it: “we do not express such an opinion.”

It is like having somebody look at your roof and your water heater. You learn about the roof and the water heater. Nobody has told you what shape the house is in.

The law says every agency gets audited “to the extent practicable,” and checking every agency by hand takes a lot of auditors. New software can now read every payment an agency makes and flag the ones that need a person’s eye. That makes every agency, every year, practical.

We Can't Run an Excellent Government Without Reliable Financials

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 11:02:56 GMT

The Comptroller General holds one of five seats on the State Fiscal Accountability Authority, the board that selects the State Auditor.1 One of the first things I plan to do with that seat is encourage the board to modernize how the state audits its agencies, so that every agency in the state can be audited.

Times have changed. An auditor used to pull a sample because reading every transaction was impossible. The tools auditors use today can check an entire set of books. Last year an outside accounting group wrote that auditors can now analyze “entire datasets, rather than relying on sampling,” and catch the odd entry a sample would never turn up.2 Modern tools make modern audits possible, including audits that check every transaction, not just some of them.

When you hear that the state has been audited, you probably picture outside accountants visiting every agency, going through its books, and signing off. The state’s books as a whole do get a full audit every year. The State Auditor and an outside accounting firm go through them together and sign an opinion that the numbers are fairly stated.3

That is not what happens at the agency level. For the year that ended June 30, 2024, 51 state agencies did not get an audit of their own. They got something called agreed-upon procedures.4 It is not an unusual arrangement. But it is not an audit.

In an audit, the accountant decides for himself what to test, tests enough to satisfy himself, and signs his name to a verdict on whether the books are right. In agreed-upon procedures, the agency and the auditor agree ahead of time on a list: pull ten receipts and match them to the ledger, check five bonus payments, look at two months of bank reconciliations. The auditor does what is on the list and writes down what he saw. He does not go past the list. He does not say whether the books as a whole are right, because the engagement never asked him to. Every one of these reports says so: “we do not express such an opinion or conclusion.” Some agencies also agree up front that small errors go unreported, under $1,000 at the Department of Corrections, under $200 at Social Services.5

It is the difference between a home inspection and asking a man to check the roof and the water heater. He checks the roof and the water heater. Nobody has told you what shape the house is in.

These are not small offices. The South Carolina Department of Administration, which runs the state’s central services, gets the lighter review. So does the South Carolina Department of Commerce. It has had the lighter review since 2005, when a sentence in the state budget let it skip the audit the law had required since 1993.6 So does the South Carolina Office of the Adjutant General, which runs the National Guard. So do the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, which runs Medicaid, the South Carolina Department of Social Services, and the South Carolina Department of Corrections. So does the State Fiscal Accountability Authority itself. And so does the South Carolina Office of the Comptroller General, the one I am asking you for.7

Then the numbers from every agency, the audited ones and the 51, are sent to the Comptroller General, who compiles them into the state’s annual financial report. The State Auditor and the outside firm audit that report. They test a sample of the compiled numbers, “on a test basis,” in their words, and sign their opinion on the whole.8 That opinion is real. It is an opinion on the compiled report. It does not mean every agency was audited. For 51 of them, nobody was asked to say whether their books are right.

The State Auditor’s office sees part of this. Its 2025 report says the reviews have been checking old transactions, so that by the time a problem turns up, the agency is too late to fix it, and the office is moving the reviews to current transactions.9 Nearly half of last year’s reviews included some.

It is time to modernize how we do state audits. The Comptroller General cannot audit the agencies himself. He keeps the books, and the person who keeps the books does not get to grade them. But he sits on the board that picks the State Auditor, with the Governor, the Treasurer and the two budget chairmen, and a seat at that table is a voice. I am not going to tell you what the new process should be. That takes thought, and it takes the board, the State Auditor and the legislature agreeing to it. What I will do is encourage the members of the board to embrace the tools auditors now have, so the state can check every agency, every year, for about what it spends now.

What that buys is better books. When an agency’s books are checked whole instead of sampled, the mistakes get found the year they happen, and the numbers that reach the state’s annual report have something behind them. I expect it to save money, because a complete check finds the duplicate payment and the idle contract that a sample walks past. And I expect it to improve the service you get from your government, because a manager who knows his books are right can spend his time running his agency instead of reconstructing last year.

You balance your checkbook every month, every line, and you would not sign your name to a year you had only glanced at. For 51 of its agencies, the state checks a few dozen entries and signs no opinion. We can do better than that now, and the tools to do it are on the shelf. We can’t expect to run an excellent government if we don’t have reliable financials.

Next week: Three Things My Office Will Publish in Its First Year.

Last week:

S.C. Code § 11-7-10: "The State Fiscal Accountability Authority shall select the State Auditor." § 11-55-10(A): the Authority consists of the Governor, the State Treasurer, the Comptroller General, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, all ex officio.

Center for Audit Quality, “Auditors and AI in the New Era of Audit,” by Trevor Barton, Managing Partner, Quality, Risk & Regulatory, Deloitte & Touche LLP, August 11, 2025, thecaq.org: “The ability to analyze entire datasets, rather than relying on sampling, further enhances accuracy and allows for the identification of subtle anomalies that might otherwise go undetected.” The Center for Audit Quality is a public-policy organization of public-company auditors; the article is the author’s, not the state’s.

State of South Carolina, Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, Independent Auditors’ Report, pp. 18-19, signed jointly by the Office of the State Auditor and Mauldin & Jenkins: “In our opinion, based on our joint audit and the reports of other auditors, the financial statements referred to above present fairly, in all material respects, the respective financial position ... in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.” The FY2024 report was audited jointly with CliftonLarsonAllen (State Auditor’s 2025 Accountability Report, p. 1).

S.C. Code § 11-7-20(A): “The State Auditor, to the extent practicable and consistent with his overall responsibility, shall audit or cause to be audited each State agency and entity annually.” Office of the State Auditor, 2025 Annual Accountability Report, p. 1: “Completion of 51 agreed-upon procedures engagements for state agencies covering fiscal year 2024, including 23 engagements that also included procedures covering a portion of fiscal year 2025.” P. 6 describes the work as “attestation engagements of each state agency that is not separately audited, which are focused on internal controls.” Separately audited financial statements for the year ended June 30, 2025 are posted at osa.sc.gov/reports for, among others, the University of South Carolina, Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina, the Department of Transportation and the South Carolina Retirement Systems. Agreed-upon procedures engagements are performed under attestation standards of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, which each report cites.

The standard language in the agreed-upon procedures reports cited here: the agency’s management “has agreed to and acknowledged that the procedures performed are appropriate to meet the intended purpose,” and “We were not engaged to and did not conduct an examination or review engagement, the objective of which would be the expression of an opinion or conclusion, respectively ... Accordingly, we do not express such an opinion or conclusion.” Department of Corrections report dated August 30, 2024: “Management of the Department has agreed that the following deficiencies will not be included in the State Auditor’s Report on Applying Agreed-Upon Procedures: Errors of less than $1,000 related to cash receipts and non-payroll cash disbursements transactions. Errors of less than $1,000 related to reporting packages.” Department of Social Services report dated October 24, 2024: the same sentence, followed by “Errors of less than $200.” The sample sizes in the body (ten receipts, five bonus payments, two months of reconciliations) are from those two reports. Seven of the eight reports cited in note 7 carry the sentence as quoted; the Office of the Comptroller General’s report, prepared by The Brittingham Group, reads “Accordingly, we do not express an opinion or conclusion.”

S.C. Code § 13-1-50 as enacted by Act 181 of 1993, Section 243: the Department of Commerce “shall be audited ... once each year,” with audited financial statements delivered to the General Assembly by October 15. Proviso 27.25 of the fiscal year 2005-06 Appropriations Act (H.3716, as ratified) first allowed agreed-upon procedures in place of audited statements; it ran as Proviso 27.23 in 2006-07 and 27.22 in 2007-08. Act 353 of 2008, Part 31.B.1, effective July 1, 2008, wrote the sentence into § 13-1-50, which now reads that the department “may undergo an Agreed Upon Procedures audit in lieu of having audited financial statements.” The sentence does not appear in any ratified budget from 2000-01 through 2004-05.

Each is an Independent Accountant’s Report on Applying Agreed Upon Procedures issued by the Office of the State Auditor, and each states that the accountants do not express an opinion or conclusion. Department of Administration: fiscal year ended June 30, 2024 and July 1, 2024 to April 30, 2025, dated June 12, 2025. Department of Commerce: the same periods, dated June 23, 2025. Office of the Adjutant General: fiscal years ended June 30, 2025 and 2024, dated September 5, 2025. Department of Health and Human Services: July 1, 2023 through May 31, 2024 and select procedures for fiscal year 2023, dated October 21, 2024. Department of Social Services: July 1, 2023 to April 30, 2024 and select procedures for fiscal year 2023, dated October 24, 2024. Department of Corrections: fiscal year ended June 30, 2024 and selected procedures for fiscal year 2023, dated August 30, 2024. State Fiscal Accountability Authority: July 1, 2025 to April 30, 2026 and fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, dated August 20, 2026. Office of the Comptroller General: fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, dated February 5, 2026, performed by The Brittingham Group, L.L.P. under contract with the State Auditor (the fiscal year 2024 report, dated January 13, 2025, was performed by the same firm under the same contract). All are posted at osa.sc.gov/reports or its archive.

S.C. Code § 11-7-20(B): “Annually the State Auditor shall audit or cause to be audited the State’s basic financial statements prepared by the Comptroller General of South Carolina.” FY2025 ACFR, Independent Auditors’ Report, p. 19: “Such procedures include examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements.” P. 18: the auditors’ opinion is “based on our joint audit and the reports of other auditors,” and the report includes a table of the shares of assets and revenues audited by other auditors.

Office of the State Auditor, 2025 Annual Accountability Report, p. 2: “Recognizing that the historical nature of our agreed-upon procedures engagements does not allow agency management to timely respond to findings, we are shifting focus to procedures performed on more current, rather than historical, financial data and transactions ... Nearly half the engagements completed during the year included procedures around current financial transactions.”

Kill the SC Income Tax! - Show Me The Money Episode 7

Mike Burkhold — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:20:49 GMT

In this episode of Show Me the Money, Mike Burkhold explains his proposed road to ending the state income tax without raising another tax: hold spending growth to population and inflation, about 4% a year, and use revenue growth above that to reduce the income tax over time.

The legislature holds the line on spending.

The Comptroller General counts the money and makes the numbers clear.

Subscribe to Show Me the Money and read Mike’s Tuesday report, The Man Who Counts: https://count.burkhold.net

South Carolina Can End the Income Tax Without Raising Another One

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:01:56 GMT

This spring the legislature passed a law, H.4216, that sets the income tax on a path to zero. The law sets the goal, but not the schedule. The money to get there has already been flowing into the state’s main account, which took in $7 billion in 2015 and $14 billion in 2025. That is $7 billion more in 2025 than in 2015. In 2025 the income tax accounted for $6 billion of the $14 billion. The growth in the account is bigger than everything the income tax brings in.1

It makes sense to end this tax as soon as possible, and the state’s own books say it can be reduced to zero and taken off the books without a new tax, or a higher one, taking its place.

Ending the tax means more money goes home with South Carolina workers every month.2 It means no state return to fill out in April, and no state tax taken out of a pension or a paycheck.

Eight states get by without an income tax, and three of them, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, are Southern states like ours. Both of our neighbors charge less than South Carolina charges now. North Carolina is at 3.99 percent and Georgia at 4.99.3

South Carolina’s top rate is not just a rich man’s rate. Last year the top rate, 6 percent, started at about $18,000 of income after deductions, so three out of four returns that owed anything owed at the top rate.4 The new law moves that line to $30,000 and the rate to 5.21 percent, and about six in ten returns that owe anything will owe at the top rate under it.5

South Carolina was the fastest-growing state in the country last year, and 66,622 more people moved in from other states than moved out.6 It grew that fast with the income tax in place, so nobody can say the tax slows growth. The case for ending the income tax is plainer than that: the money to end it is already here, and it belongs to the people who earned it. North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas all charge less income tax than we do. And our legislature can end the income tax without raising another one.

The new law’s rule cuts the tax only in those years the state’s forecasters predict the income tax will grow 5 percent. Problem is, that forecast has not been made since 2018.7 The first year’s $308.7 million did not wait on a forecast. The legislature wrote it straight into the rates.

So the question is where the money to finish the job will come from. A rate cut is permanent, and the money to replace the income tax has to come in every year. It comes from the sales tax, which grows on its own as the state’s population and economy grow, with no need to add any new items subject to it.

On the spending side, our main account doubled in ten years, and the state spent it as fast as it came in.8 Half of that growth was population plus inflation, what economists call “popflation.” The other half, about $3.4 billion a year by now, was the state choosing to spend more, and every dollar of it is a dollar the income tax could have come down instead.9

We have a great opportunity now if South Carolina can hold its spending to popflation, about 4 percent a year. If it does, the sales tax and the rest of what it already collects grow past what it spends each year. The income tax comes down by the difference, year after year, on money that came in. Nobody has to find $6 billion. The state just has to stop spending every new dollar the minute it arrives. If the next ten years go like the last ten, holding spending to popflation would cut the income tax rate about in half by the end of them, a little more each year, and keep cutting after that.

The road to zero gets shorter every time the state finds spending it can stop, and there are three ways to shorten it. The state can run its agencies the way a business runs, and every dollar of waste it finds comes off the tax. It can freeze spending for a few years instead of holding it to 4 percent; one study of the tax found that a four-year freeze followed by six years at popflation would pay for the whole tax in ten.10 And it can put some of its considerable reserves toward the job: the main account closed 2025 with $6.6 billion unspent, and that money can buy the tax down while the growth catches up.11 Each one has a price. A freeze means prices rise and the budget does not. Reserves pay once and have to be replaced. Savings have to be found before they count. But each one moves the day closer, and the legislature can choose any of them.

Ending the income tax can also change how South Carolina recruits business. One place to look first is what the state spends to bring businesses here. Commerce hands out grants and job development credits, which let a company keep part of the income tax withheld from its new workers’ paychecks, to the companies it picks.12 The state’s own audit found that Commerce checks what those companies deliver mostly by reading what the companies report, and that it “has not found a credible way” to measure what the incentives return.

More than 530,000 of South Carolina’s businesses are small, 99 in 100 of them, and they added seven of every ten new jobs the state gained last year.13 The companies Commerce bargains with are the ones big enough to promise a plant or a headquarters; the plumber, the pharmacy, and the family restaurant never get to that table. A lower income tax reaches all 530,000 small business owners and the big ones too, on the same terms, with no one in Columbia picking favorites. Nobody can count how many businesses a lower income tax rate brings; the record does not say. But a state that costs less to do business in has less to make up with checks and incentives, and every check it does not have to write is a dollar closer to zero for South Carolina taxpayers.

The state took its share of your paycheck before you saw it, every year, and over the last ten years what it took in doubled. It could have let the income tax come down by the difference. It spent the difference instead. Hold the line on spending, count the money, and the tax can come down as fast as the money is there. The line is the legislature’s to hold. The count is the Comptroller General’s: what each agency is holding, what each dollar of it is for, identifying waste, and how much is left over from business that is finished, on one page anyone can read.

Next week: We Can’t Run an Excellent Government Without Reliable Financials

Last week:

Budgetary-basis General Fund revenue, net of the transfer to the Trust Fund for Tax Relief, from the Growth Source Banking Log v9.6 (August 11, 2026), flows series, endpoints image-confirmed: FY2015 $6,960,389 thousand (FY2015 CAFR, pp. 158-159) and FY2025 $14,057,744 thousand, the difference $7,097,355 thousand. The FY2025 figure is also the Board of Economic Advisors' "Net General Fund Revenue" for FY 2024-25, $14,057,743,518, on its "General Fund Revenue Forecast as of May 19, 2026," p. 2 (rfa.sc.gov/media/11516; page image confirmed September 23, 2026). "2015" and "2025" are fiscal years ending June 30; FY2025 is the latest year the state's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report covers. The budgetary-basis schedule the figure comes from is supplementary information in that report, outside the audited statements, and the Comptroller General's year-end report of August 2025 prints the same $14,057,743,518, marked unaudited; the two are one number from one closing. The individual income tax: $6,722,186,938 collected in FY 2024-25 before the trust-fund transfer (BEA table, p. 1; S.C. Department of Revenue, 2024-2025 Annual Report, p. 5, gives $6,722,186,937), and about $5.9 billion after it, the basis on which it sits inside the $14 billion; the combined individual and corporate transfer that year was $800,815,175 (BEA table, p. 2). The $7.1 billion exceeds the tax on either basis. This is the increase in the account's yearly revenue over ten years set against one year of income tax.

What the tax costs a household, for the reader who asks: S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, Statement of Estimated Fiscal Impact, H.4216, signed by the Governor March 30, 2026, impact date May 29, 2026, Table 1, total row: new average tax liability $2,209 across all 2,757,573 returns, including the 35 percent that owe nothing. Second anchor: the Department of Revenue’s tax year 2024 total liability, $5,950,104,066 (Annual Report, p. 7), over its 2,672,816 returns (p. 9), is $2,226 per return. Per return that owed anything, about $3,800. “4 in 10 returns that owe nothing”: 1,107,177 of 2,672,816, 41.42 percent (Annual Report, p. 7).

Tax Foundation, “State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets, 2026,” table as of January 1, 2026, data as of February 11, 2026: eight states with no individual income tax (Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming); Washington is listed separately as taxing capital gains only. North Carolina 3.99 percent flat as of January 1, 2026. Georgia: 5.19 percent on the Tax Foundation’s table as of February 11, 2026; reduced to 4.99 percent for tax year 2026, retroactive to January 1, by HB 463, signed May 11, 2026, with annual reductions toward 3.99 percent beginning 2027 (Georgia Department of Revenue, revised 2026 Employer’s Withholding Tax Guide, June 2026; Bloomberg Tax, May 13 and June 9, 2026; Tax Stance banking log A25). Both neighbors under South Carolina’s 5.21. South Carolina’s top rate was 6 percent for tax year 2025 (RFA statement on H.4216, p. 1; RFA press release, November 18, 2025) and is 5.21 percent under the 2026 law. The rates for every state named in the piece are on the chart with the essay.

Brackets: for tax year 2026 the state’s rates were 0 percent up to $3,640 of taxable income, 3 percent to $18,230, and 6 percent above (the RFA statement’s rate chart for H.4216; Tax Foundation 2026); tax year 2024’s thresholds were lower, since the brackets are indexed. At an $18,230 floor the tax owed is 3 percent of ($18,230 minus $3,640), about $438, before credits. So any return that owed more than $500 had taxable income above the floor and was taxed at the top rate. The Department of Revenue’s tax year 2024 table of returns by tax liability (2024-2025 Annual Report, p. 7; page image confirmed September 23, 2026) shows 1,197,827 returns owing more than $500, which is 76 percent of the 1,565,639 returns that owed anything and 45 percent of all 2,672,816 returns. The count is a floor: returns in the $438 to $500 band, and returns whose credits pulled a top-bracket liability under $500, are excluded. “About $18,000”: $18,230. The new law’s top bracket begins at $30,000 (RFA statement, p. 1).

Who still pays the top rate under the new law: a return with $30,000 of taxable income owed about $1,144 under the 2026 brackets (3 percent of $18,230 minus $3,640, plus 6 percent of $30,000 minus $18,230) and about $1,176 under tax year 2024’s lower indexed thresholds, before credits; so any return owing more than about $1,150 had taxable income above $30,000. The Department of Revenue’s tax year 2024 table (Annual Report, p. 7, image-closed) shows 932,857 returns owing more than $1,250, which is 59.6 percent of the 1,565,639 returns that owed anything; counting the whole $1,001 to $1,250 band would make it 64.8 percent. “About six in ten” is the floor. Under the new law, taxable income above $30,000 is taxed at 5.21 percent (RFA statement, p. 1).

U.S. Census Bureau, press release, “U.S. Population Growth Slows Due to Historic Decline in Net International Migration” (Vintage 2025 estimates), January 27, 2026: “Fueled by a sizeable net domestic migration increase of 66,622, South Carolina’s population grew by 79,958 between July 1, 2024, and July 1, 2025,” 1.5 percent, the highest rate of any state; Idaho 1.4 and North Carolina 1.3 followed. Tie: S.C. Department of Employment and Workforce, “South Carolina Records Fastest Population Growth in the Country,” February 17, 2026, same figures; the Census July 1, 2025 total, 5,570,274, is the population endpoint in note 8. “Nobody can say the tax slows growth” is the record’s own limit on the argument: the growth happened under a 6 percent top rate, and the piece makes no claim that ending the tax will change the rate of growth. “All charge less income tax than we do”: North Carolina 3.99 percent; Florida, Tennessee, and Texas none; South Carolina 5.21 percent under the 2026 law (note 3).

S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office, Statement of Estimated Fiscal Impact, H.4216, signed by the Governor March 30, 2026, impact date May 29, 2026, pp. 1-2: tax year 2026 rates of 1.99 percent on taxable income up to $30,000 and 5.21 percent above; “The bill will reduce individual income tax liability by approximately $308,700,000 in tax year 2026”; General Fund impact ($308,700,000) in FY 2026-27. The rule for later years, p. 1: rates “will be reduced annually beginning in tax year 2027 if individual income tax revenue, less amounts credited to the Trust Fund for Tax Relief, is projected to grow by at least 5 percent in the following fiscal year,” each reduction sized “to reduce individual income tax revenue by approximately $200,000,000 or 25 percent of the recurring income tax revenue surplus, whichever is greater,” limited to the projected increase where that is under $200,000,000, on the February 15 forecast. The enrolled text of H.4216, Section 12-6-510(C)(3), sets the figure as “two hundred million dollars” and contains no inflation adjustment or index (scstatehouse.gov/sess126_2025-2026/bills/4216.htm, read September 23, 2026); the 25 percent alternative scales with the surplus and applies only when it exceeds $200 million. “About $200 million”: the 25 percent rule exceeds $200 million only when projected growth exceeds $800 million, about 13 percent on a $6 billion base. A 5 percent year on about $6 billion is about $300 million, so in a year the law works the tax grows about $100 million net of the cut; in a year under 5 percent the law does nothing. The BEA’s May 19, 2026 forecast, made before the law’s adjustments, has the tax growing 0.6 percent this year and 1.3 percent next.

Growth Source Banking Log v9.6, flows and deflators, all endpoints image-confirmed: revenues +102.0 percent and expenditures +102.9 percent, FY2015 to FY2025. Population July 1, 2015, 4,896,006 (Census intercensal estimates via the S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office State Data Center) to July 1, 2025, 5,570,274 (Census Vintage 2025, released January 27, 2026), +13.77 percent. CPI-U, all items, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted, June 2015 238.638 to June 2025 322.561 (BLS releases of July 17, 2015 and July 15, 2025), +35.17 percent. Keep-pace factor 1.5378, “about half.” The other half, $3,354,058 thousand on revenues (note 9), is growth beyond people and prices. Annualized, spending about 7.3 percent a year against about 4.4 for people and prices; the body says “about 4” and “7.”

“About $3.4 billion a year by now” and “cut the income tax rate about in half”: Growth Source Banking Log v9.6: population +13.77 percent and CPI-U +35.17 percent, FY2015 to FY2025 (inputs in note 8); keep-pace factor 1.5378. Arithmetic: FY2015 revenue $6,960,389 thousand times 1.5378 is $10,703,686 thousand, the revenue that would have kept pace with people and prices; FY2025 actual $14,057,744 thousand exceeds it by $3,354,058 thousand, “about $3.4 billion a year.” Against the individual income tax that is 57 percent of the $5.9 billion net figure and 50 percent of the $6.7 billion gross figure, “about half.” “Cut the income tax rate about in half by the end of them” (the road paragraph): the same two growth rates run forward ten years from FY2025. Other revenue (the Board of Economic Advisors’ gross General Fund revenue for FY 2024-25, $14,858,559 thousand, less the $6,722,187 thousand income tax, about $8.1 billion; BEA table of May 19, 2026, pp. 1-2) at the past decade’s 7.3 percent a year reaches about $16.4 billion; spending held to 4.4 percent reaches about $21.6 billion; the income tax then has to cover about $5.2 billion, less than the $5.9 billion it brings the main account today and about 43 percent of the $12.0 billion it would bring by then at the same growth. The rate comes down year by year as the gap opens. On popflation alone, other revenue covers spending in about 20 years. The projection assumes the next decade’s revenue growth matches the last; a slower decade lengthens the road.

Russell S. Sobel, South Carolina Individual Income Tax Elimination Study (2025; project file “SC Ind Inc Tax Elimination Study Final”), section 9, “Phasing Out the Individual Income Tax Over Time”: on the study’s assumptions, limiting general fund expenditure growth to population plus inflation (4 percent) accomplishes elimination “in roughly 14 years by slower expenditure growth alone,” and “a 4-year freeze in general fund spending followed by 6 years of limiting growth to the combined rate of population growth and inflation could also fund the elimination of the income tax.” The study’s revenue base is $6.3 billion and its spending growth rate 6.9 percent (2014 to 2024); the piece’s own series (notes 8 and 9) runs on $6.7 billion and 7.3 percent, which is why the piece’s popflation-alone road is longer than the study’s. “Pay for the whole tax in ten” is the study’s simulation, stated as its finding, not the piece’s.

FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, p. 194: budgetary-basis General Fund balance after reservations, $6,604,224 thousand, including $3,426 million in legislatively approved agency carryover appropriations (the standing project anchor; page image in the project’s QC files). “Considerable reserves” names that balance, which is spendable cash on the budgetary basis, and not the state’s formal General Reserve and Capital Reserve Funds, which are smaller and governed by their own statutes. A reserve draw buys a rate cut for the years it covers and has to be replaced; it does not change the yearly arithmetic in note 9.

Job development credits: Legislative Audit Council, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, June 2020, p. 3: JDCs “are tax rebates that businesses can take against their employee withholdings on their quarterly state withholding tax returns”; p. 25: “JDC funds are rebates from the employee withholding taxes.” Legislative Audit Council, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, June 2020: “the only evidence DOC uses to verify companies’ job creation/retention is documentation provided by the company, itself” (p. 41); no site visit was made between September 2018 and the audit’s start in August 2019, and 21 of the 53 visits since 2014 came after the audit began (p. 42). Follow-up report, August 2024: of 39 recommendations, 17 implemented, 6 partial, 14 not implemented (p. 1); the retrospective return analysis (Recommendation 10) declined, Commerce stating it “has not found a credible way” to do it (p. 2); additional verification of claimed jobs “not practical” (p. 2). Both reports are project files, banked for The Money That Never Came Back (July 14), The Honor System (July 21), and The Second Inspection (July 28); the quotes are as banked there. Concession, as in those pieces: the Council’s own history shows 289 finished grants, 2015 to 2025, at 115 percent of required jobs and 139 percent of required investment, on company-certified numbers (CCED 2025 Annual Report, p. 25). “A lower income tax is an incentive too”: stated as reasoning, not as a measured effect; the piece makes no claim about how many businesses a rate change brings. Basis for “costs less to do business in”: S.C. Code 12-6-545 (read September 25) lets a pass-through owner elect a 3 percent rate on active trade or business income, but excludes amounts reasonably related to the owner’s own services, which stay at the individual rates; H.4216 does not amend it. The individual rate is what a business owner pays on the labor half of the business’s income and on every wage it pays.

U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy, “2025 Small Business Profile: South Carolina” (advocacy.sba.gov, June 2025), p. 1: 530,402 small businesses, 99.4 percent of South Carolina businesses; 863,326 small business employees, 42.9 percent of the state’s employees; between March 2023 and March 2024 the state’s establishments added a net 35,780 jobs, of which small businesses contributed 25,358, 70.9 percent (source data: Census Nonemployer Statistics and Statistics of U.S. Businesses; BLS Business Employment Dynamics). “Small” in the SBA’s count is a firm with fewer than 500 employees; about 98 percent of the 530,402 have fewer than 20, computed from the profile’s size table (440,037 with no employees plus 79,440 with 1 to 19, 97.9 percent), not a printed figure. “Last year” is the profile’s latest year, March 2023 to March 2024. “Never get to that table” is the mechanism, not a count: a Commerce grant or job development credit is negotiated per project against job and investment commitments (LAC 2020, ch. 2), which is not a transaction a firm of a few employees enters; the piece does not claim no firm under 500 employees has ever received one. Banked at Tax Stance log A27; the primary PDF’s own text read September 25.

Show Me The Money Episode 6

Mike Burkhold — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:11:14 GMT

Last year, SC Agencies kept over $3 Billion of unspent money. I’ll figure out what that money is for and will report it out to everyone.

One Page to Justify Billions of Dollars

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:03:23 GMT

Last year’s state budget gave the Department of Commerce $71 million from the General Fund, the state’s main account. When the year ended June 30, Commerce carried $469 million forward.1

Money an agency has not spent by June 30 normally goes back to the General Fund. Carried forward means a sentence in the budget let the agency keep it instead, this year’s money and money from earlier years too. The Comptroller General’s year-end report prints Commerce’s $469 million balance to the dollar. It does not say what the money is for.

The same department runs the state’s business incentives, the grants and tax credits offered to companies. In 2020 the state’s auditors recommended that Commerce look back and measure what the incentives returned. In 2024 Commerce answered that it “has not found a credible way” to do it.2

The $469 million and the incentive money are separate sums. What they share is a blank where an answer should be.

Some of the money agencies keep is roof money, the kind a careful family sets aside in March for a roof that goes on in September. A careful agency does the same. The people who write the budget may already have a list of what each balance is for. If they do, printing it costs nothing.

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The budget, almost 600 pages, is written to give agencies permission to spend. The state’s annual financial report, 316 pages, is written to satisfy accounting standards. The Comptroller General’s year-end report, 10 pages, is written to close the books. That is more than 900 pages. Not one was written to answer a taxpayer’s question. So none of them does.3

Agencies carried $3.12 billion forward last year. What is that money for? The year-end report gives one total for each agency and no reason beside any of them.4

You can answer that question about your own money, because your bank sends you a statement every month without being asked. The statement shows what was there, what came in, what went out, and what is left. You never filed a records request for it. The state’s year-end report is that statement with everything above the totals torn off. It shows what each agency was cleared to spend, what it spent, and what it kept. It does not explain why that money was kept and what the agency plans to use it for.

Both filled cells are from the Comptroller General’s year-end report, page 4.

One office keeps the book these dollars are written in. A state law that traces all the way back to the year 1834 says the Comptroller General “shall keep a book in which all appropriations by the General Assembly shall be entered, with all payments made under them.” Agencies send their bills to his office, his office approves them, and the Treasurer pays.5 So the page the state is missing is his to print.

That page has one line for every balance an agency kept. Each line says how much the balance is and gives enough detail for a citizen to understand what the money is to be used for.

The dollars are already in the state’s books, so the cost is the work of putting them on the page. What the books may not hold is what each balance is for. If I am elected Comptroller General, my office will publish this page every year. If the accounting system does not hold the detail yet, I will work to see that it does. Nothing I found in the office’s own law or in the budget stops it from printing any of this.6

What happens to the money on the page is the legislature’s call. Whatever it decides, the public and the legislature should be able to see the money, and the legislature should look at it every year. The page puts it on the table.

Some of that $3.12 billion in our tax dollars is being held for important projects that take years to finish. Some could be left over from projects that are long dead. From what the state publishes, there is no way to know how much is which. That is the whole point. The page is how anyone tells which.

You counted that money to the dollar when it was yours. It came out of your check before you saw it. For the money you kept, your bank sends you a statement every month. For the money you sent to Columbia, one page is the least owed back.

South Carolina is a great state that can be the best-run in the country. A state that can hand any taxpayer that page is a state worth bragging about. The page is the Comptroller General’s to print. Printing it is the job I am asking for.

Next week: South Carolina Can End the Income Tax Without Raising Another One

Last week:

Office of the Comptroller General, year-end report, August 18, 2026, “Budgetary General Fund, Appropriations and Expenditures, Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2026 (Unaudited),” report page 4, Commerce: appropriations per act $70,871,052; appropriations carried forward to 2027 $468,654,727. Page 5 sorts the carried-forward amount into $464,914,835 of special carry-forwards, which the report defines as balances that provisos in Part 1B of the Appropriations Act allow certain agencies to carry forward, and $3,739,892 under proviso 117.23’s general authority. These are General Fund figures only; the department also spends federal and other funds. Footnote b on page 4 says adjusted authorizations exceed appropriations per act statewide because of “prior year carryforwards, current year supplemental appropriations, lapses per proviso, open-ended appropriations, governor vetoes and other budget adjustments,” and gives no breakdown by agency.

Legislative Audit Council, Follow-Up Report, August 2024, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, page 2, Recommendation 10: the department “should conduct a ‘look back’ analysis of the fiscal impact of projects approved for grants and job development credits.” Status: not implemented. The department “has evaluated this recommendation and has not found a credible way to conduct an effective ‘look back’ analysis for any given project.” The recommendation was made in the Council’s June 2020 review. Job development credits are tax credits, not appropriations, and neither they nor the grants are the carried-forward balance in note 1.

H.5126, the FY2026-27 General Appropriations Act as ratified August 11, 2026 (R.276; Act 259 of 2026), runs 265 pages of Part IA, a two-page statement of revenues, and 325 pages of Part IB, printed pages 1 to 592. The State of South Carolina Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, runs 316 pages. The year-end report in note 1 runs ten. Together, 918. On what each is written to do: the act’s title is “to make appropriations ... to regulate the expenditure of such funds”; Proviso 97.2 of the same act, page 475, states the intent “that the State of South Carolina issue financial statements in conformance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles”; the August 18 release opens “South Carolina closes the 2025-26 fiscal year.”

Year-end report, page 4, Total line: appropriations carried forward to 2027, $3,123,389,420. Page 5 sorts it into $2,945,996,546 of special carry-forwards and $177,392,874 of general carry-forwards and states no purpose, authorizing proviso, or age for any balance.

S.C. Code § 11-3-50, quoted in the body; its history note runs to 1834. § 11-3-100: the Comptroller General’s books are “a transcript of the books of the Treasury, constituting a complete check upon that office.” § 11-3-130: payments by the State Treasurer, “except for interest on the public debt and the pay of officers, members and attaches of the General Assembly, shall be made on warrants drawn by the Comptroller General.” § 11-3-185: on a requisition with “invoices or other satisfactory evidence of the propriety of the payment,” the Comptroller General “shall issue a warrant on the State Treasurer.” § 11-3-140: the Treasurer “shall then make payment of the obligation by check.” H.5126, Part IB, Proviso 97.2, page 475: “the Comptroller General is directed, as the State Accounting Officer, to maintain an Enterprise Information System for State Government (SCEIS).”

What was searched: all twenty sections of Title 11, Chapter 3 of the S.C. Code, and all 1,353 provisos in Part IB of H.5126 as ratified. No section or proviso restricts what the Comptroller General may publish. Three provisos pair the office with disclosure language (1.20, 1A.13, 117.26), and each requires publication. The state’s Freedom of Information Act exemptions were not reviewed; they govern individual records, not totals.

Show me the Money Episode 5

Mike Burkhold — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 17:50:52 GMT

South Carolina committed well over $1 billion to Scout Motors. How will taxpayers know whether it delivered? Announcements are easy. Results must be measured. Watch the new episode of Show Me the Mone

SC Agencies Have Home Field Advantage

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:01:09 GMT

Sixth and last in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.

One sentence in the 2000 state budget let the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics keep the money it had not spent. Unspent money normally goes back to the state’s main account, and the legislature decides where it goes next. This sentence let the school keep it instead, and it has never said why.1 The same sentence is in the budget that took effect July 1, 2026. Only 15 of the 170 people who vote on that budget were in the General Assembly in 2000.2

The budget that took effect July 1 has 280 sentences like it, and the money kept under them came to $3.12 billion.3

In football the home team plays every week on its own field, and the visitors come to town for an afternoon and go home. That is the arrangement between the permanent state agencies that hold the state’s money and the legislature that votes on it.

The legislature comes to Columbia the second Tuesday in January, and the law sends it home by the second Thursday in May.4 This year that was January 13 to May 14, plus a handful of days after to finish the budget, the last of them August 11. Base pay for the job is $10,400 a year.5 And the roster turns over. Of the 170 members serving today, 126 arrived after 2010.6

The agencies are there all year. They keep the accounts, and every August they report to the Comptroller General, agency by agency, exactly how much they did not spend and kept.7 Nobody knows those balances better than the people running the agencies holding them, because they are the ones who wrote the numbers down.

Who those agencies answer to is a longer list than most people think. State law names 23 departments in the executive branch, and even those have four different kinds of boss, from a director the Governor appoints to an officer the voters elected to another job, like the Superintendent of Education.8 The universities, the ports, Santee Cooper, and dozens of other agencies are not on that list. Each answers to its own board, and no voter has ever elected one of those boards.9

For a lot of the agencies, keeping the money is the right call. A careful agency in the middle of a multi-year project should not have to hand the money back on June 30 and hope it comes back in July. A careful household does the same thing when it sets aside the roof money in March for a job that starts in September. Some of the $3.12 billion is exactly that, and the agencies holding it are doing what a prudent family does.

So how much of the $3.12 billion is “roof money”?

From the documents the state publishes, there is no way to know. So the home field advantage is worth somewhere between $0 and $3.12 billion. If every dollar is “roof money,” the advantage is worth nothing, and the money is sitting where it should. If none of it is, the advantage is worth $3.12 billion. The budget cannot tell you where in that range the truth falls, because the 280 sentences that keep the money do not say why it needs to stay. The Comptroller General’s August report that adds it up to the dollar does not say either.10 A taxpayer reading both documents at her kitchen table would know how much stayed and in which agency’s name, and nothing else. Same for a legislator.

A sentence goes into the budget, in a year when most of today’s members were not there, with no reason attached. The next year it is printed again. The legislature sees it for four months, inside a budget of almost six hundred pages, and votes yes or no on the whole book once.11 The agency holding the money lives with it all year and knows to the dollar what it holds. Nobody on either side did anything wrong. The reason was never written down, so nobody can go back later, follow the money, and check whether it held up.

The incentive runs one way. More money on hand is better than less, for an agency the same as for anyone, and once a sentence lets an agency keep the money, nothing in the budget ever asks the agency about it again.

South Carolina’s General Fund, the state’s main account: money in and money out, 2014 to 2025. Both doubled.

Sentences in the budget that let an agency keep unspent money, counted the same way in seven budgets: 109 in 2000, 297 now. The 280 in the text is this year’s count after a closer read. footnote 12

You counted that money to the dollar when it was yours. It came out of your check before you saw it, and the least owed back was to know where it went and what it was for. The state can tell you that $3.12 billion of it stayed with the agencies. It cannot or does not tell you whether that was thrift or neglect, because the reason an agency should keep the money is not in the budget.

Asking what the kept money is for is the General Assembly’s job. The money is theirs to leave with the agencies or call back, and a sentence that said why, or a page that showed what each balance is for, would let the visiting team play on level ground. Until that happens, expect the home team to keep its advantage. That is a question the next budget can put on the table, and it is the kind that gets answered once somebody asks it.

The Governor can put the same question to the agencies that answer to him, and the boards and elected officers who run the rest can put it to theirs. How the next governor holds his to account could go a long way toward deciding whether the field gets level.

The Comptroller General is there all year too. When I hold that office, the page that shows what each balance is for will come out every year, agency by agency, so the visiting team walks in with the same numbers the home team has.

Chart Footnote12

Next week: One Page to Justify Billions.

Last week:

H.4775, the FY2000-01 General Appropriations Act, Part IB, Proviso 1.10 (SDE: Governor’s School for Science & Math): “Any unexpended balance on June 30, of the prior fiscal year of funds appropriated to or generated by the Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics may be carried forward and expended in the current fiscal year pursuant to the direction of the Board of Trustees of the School.” H.5126, the FY2026-27 act, Part IB, Proviso 10.1 (GSSM: Carry Forward), printed page 346, the same sentence with “June thirtieth” and lower-case “board of trustees of the school.” The sentence was also read in the ratified acts for FY2005-06, FY2010-11, FY2015-16, FY2019-20, and FY2025-26. The 2000 act is the earliest budget in this count; the sentence may be older. “Never said why” describes the sentence’s text in each of those acts: it states the permission and no reason for it.

Of the 124 members of the House and 46 members of the Senate as posted on scstatehouse.gov on September 4, 2026, fifteen were members of either chamber during the 1999-2000 session, when H.4775, the FY2000-01 General Appropriations Act, passed: seven in the House and eight in the Senate, two of whom served in the House at the time. Service dates are from each member’s scstatehouse.gov biography, checked against the House and Senate journal rolls of March 22 and 23 and May 11, 2000. One date is single-sourced: one member’s 2024 return to the House (the roster only).

The $3.12 billion is from the Comptroller General’s year-end report cited in note 7, page 4, appropriations carried forward to 2027: $3,123,389,420. The 280 is the count of provisos in Part 1B of H.5126 as ratified that grant an agency authority to carry unspent money past June 30, hand-checked against the ratified text on September 3, 2026, and published in this series on September 22. The pairing follows the basis this series has used since August 25: the sentences counted are the permissions in force while the money is held. The Governor vetoed one of the 280 on August 17, 2026; if the General Assembly sustains that veto the count is 279.

Constitution of South Carolina, Art. III, §9: “The annual session of the General Assembly shall convene at the State Capitol Building in the City of Columbia on the second Tuesday of January of each year.” S.C. Code §2-1-180: the regular session “shall adjourn sine die each year not later than five o’clock p.m. on the second Thursday in May,” with three listed grounds for extension. House and Senate Journals, January 13, 2026 (convened) and May 14, 2026 (adjourned sine die at 5:00 p.m.); Both chambers sat in the days after sine die to finish the budget (House Journals May 15, 18, 19, and 20; Senate Journals May 15 and 20 through 26), and on August 11, 2026, when the H.5126 conference report was adopted in both chambers and the act ratified as R.276. S.C. Code §2-1-180 was amended in 2026 by S.238 (R.127), the Governor’s veto overridden June 25, 2026, to let the President of the Senate and the Speaker call their bodies back after sine die when the appropriations bill is not finished.

H.5126, the FY2026-27 General Appropriations Act, Part IA, Section 91A, p. 217: “SENATORS @ $10,400,” $478,400 for 46 positions; Section 91B, p. 218: “REPRESENTATIVES @ $10,400,” $1,289,600 for 124 positions. S.C. Code §2-3-20 sets members’ compensation at “such sum as may be provided by law.” The 2025 Legislative Manual, p. 5, states the same figure. Members also receive subsistence for each legislative day under Proviso 91.4 and a monthly in-district allowance under Proviso 91.13; neither is added to the figure in the body.

Of the 170 members serving today, 44 were members of either chamber during the 2009-10 session at the passage of H.4657, the FY2010-11 General Appropriations Act; the other 126 arrived after. Service dates are the ones cited in note 2, checked against the House and Senate journal rolls of March 18 and April 29, 2010. One member’s November 2010 seating falls after passage and is counted among the 126.

Office of the Comptroller General, year-end report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2026, issued August 18, 2026, “Budgetary General Fund, Appropriations and Expenditures (Unaudited),” which lists appropriations carried forward agency by agency. The prior year’s report issued August 18, 2025.

The four kinds of boss, in the statute’s words. S.C. Code §1-30-10(A) creates twenty-three departments “within the executive branch of the state government,” from the Department of Administration to the Department of Environmental Services. Subsection (B)(1) sets the governing authority of each as one of: “a director or a secretary, who must be appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Senate”; “a board to be appointed and constituted in a manner provided for by law”; for Agriculture and Education, the Commissioner of Agriculture and the Superintendent of Education “elected to office under the Constitution of this State”; or, for Transportation, “a seven member commission constituted in a manner provided by law, and a Secretary of Transportation appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the Governor.”

The universities, Santee Cooper, and the Ports Authority are created by their own statutes outside §1-30-10. Three examples: the University of South Carolina’s board of trustees is sixteen members elected by the General Assembly, one appointed by the Governor, and three ex officio, among them the Governor and the Superintendent of Education (§59-117-10); Santee Cooper, the Public Service Authority, has twelve directors “appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the Senate” (§58-31-20); the Ports Authority’s board members, other than the Secretaries of Transportation and Commerce, are “appointed by the Governor, with the advice and consent of the Senate” (§54-3-20). None of these boards is elected by the voters; the ex officio seats are held by officers the voters elected to other offices. “Dozens”: Part IA of H.5126 appropriates to 113 sections. Twenty-three are the §1-30-10 departments; nineteen are the General Assembly, the courts, the constitutional officers, and statewide lines such as debt service; the other 71 are agencies, boards, commissions, authorities, and campuses outside the 23, or 51 on a reading that sets aside the regional campuses, the Governor’s Office agencies, and the boards that serve the legislature. The Ports Authority and Santee Cooper take no General Fund appropriation and have no Part IA section, so the count is a floor.

The range is arithmetic on the year-end report’s own figure: the low end assumes every carried dollar is held for a stated, time-limited purpose and the high end assumes none is. The report’s page 5 sorts the $3.12 billion into $2,945,996,546 of special carry-forwards under Part 1B provisos and $177,392,874 under proviso 117.23’s general ten percent authority, and states no purpose for any balance. The year-end report and the appropriations act are the two documents the state publishes that carry these figures; neither states a reason for any balance.

H.5126 as ratified runs 265 pages of Part IA appropriations, a two-page statement of revenues, and 325 pages of Part IB provisos, printed pages 1 to 592. The General Assembly adopts Part 1B with the rest of the act in one vote on the conference report, August 11, 2026: Senate 37 to 2, House 100 to 17.

The chart counts every proviso whose text carries carry-forward language, by the same programmatic method in each of seven ratified acts: FY2000-01 (H.4775) 109; FY2005-06 (H.3716) 160; FY2010-11 (H.4657) 188; FY2015-16 (H.3701) 212; FY2019-20 (H.4000, standing in for FY2020-21, which had no ratified act) 233; FY2025-26 (H.4025) 281; FY2026-27 (H.5126) 297. The 280 in the body is this year’s count after a second pass in which each row was read and rows that mention carried money without granting the authority to carry it were removed; that pass has been run on the two most recent years only, so the series is shown on the uniform first-pass basis, on which this year is 297. The money chart is the one published in this series on August 18, from the budgetary comparison schedules in the state’s annual financial reports, FY2014 to FY2025.

Show Me the Money Episode 4

Mike Burkhold — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:30:50 GMT

You may have heard the saying “When everyone is responsible - no one is responsible”. Thats the situation in Columbia. We must get a better handle on the money the state takes from its citizens (that’s us).

280 Reasons Agencies Keep $3.12 Billion of Your Tax Dollars, and Not One Explanation

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 11:02:39 GMT

Fifth in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.

On page 469 of the state budget that took effect July 1, the Office of Resilience gets permission to keep money it didn’t spend. The permission is one sentence long and gives no reason. The office “shall be authorized to carry forward unexpended funds from the prior fiscal year into the current fiscal year.“ Farther down the page, one sentence about one of the office’s projects says the money “shall expire at the end of the fiscal year and may not be carried forward.“ No reason there either.

The second sentence is the only one of its kind in the budget. We counted.1

Money the legislature gives an agency for a year is that year’s money. When June 30 passes, whatever an agency has not spent goes back to the General Fund, the state’s main account, for the legislature to decide on again. That has been the rule for decades.2 The exception is a sentence. If the budget has a sentence saying this agency can keep this money past June 30, the agency keeps it. Those sentences are provisos.

Last year’s budget carried 269 of them. This year’s carries 280.3 4The money kept under them came to $3.12 billion.5 In one year the legislature wrote thirteen new permissions to keep money and took two away.

It goes like that every year. Count the sentences the same way in every budget back to 2000 and the number climbs every time: 109, 160, 188, 212, 233, and 297 today.6

The Department of Corrections “may carry forward any unexpended general fund balance“ for security and operating expenses. The parks agency may keep what it didn’t spend on regional promotions.7 Each is a reasonable sentence on its own, written for one agency and one purpose, and neither says why. Each will be printed again next year unless somebody takes it out, and nobody will write down why then either.

This year the state did the one thing you’d expect to take some out. It merged three agencies, the Department of Mental Health, the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs, and the Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services, into one Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. The three old agencies had ten of these sentences between them. The new one has ten. Three of the ten are the same sentence. Each old agency had a proviso letting it keep lease-payment money, and all three came through identical except for which office is named. The legislature merged the agencies and didn’t merge a sentence.8

So who keeps track of 280 sentences? Not the numbering. This year 88 provisos in the education section changed numbers without changing a word, because a deleted proviso left a hole that got closed. A sentence about school money that was 1.30 last year is 1.29 now, and 1.30 is a rule about bus advertising. Nothing on the page says so.9

It works like the notes on your refrigerator. Somebody tapes up a new one now and then: a dentist’s number, no dishwasher after ten. Nobody takes one down. After enough years the door is paper. One of the notes is for a dentist who retired. The state’s refrigerator has 280 notes that say keep this, and one, taped up this year, that says throw this out when the year ends.

The money under those notes started as yours. It came out of your paycheck before you saw it, and while it was yours you knew where every dollar went. The sentence that keeps it with an agency was written once and voted on once, inside a bill of almost six hundred pages. It has been printed again every year since, and every vote since has been on the whole bill, never on the sentence.

Some of the 280 are doing what a careful family does when it sets money aside. Some are holding money nobody has looked at since the year the sentence was written, and nothing in the budget tells you which is which. The legislature wrote every one of them, so it is the only body that can take one back, and this year it proved it can with one sentence that makes money expire. Once all 280 sit on one list next to the one that says no, each with its agency, the balance under it, and the years it has been printed, your representatives can decide which deserve to stay. If I am elected Comptroller General, my office will publish that list every year.

Next week: SC Agencies have Home Field Advantage

Last week:

Proviso 92D.3 (SCOR: Carry Forward), printed page 469: "The Office of Resilience shall be authorized to carry forward unexpended funds from the prior fiscal year into the current fiscal year and expend the funds for the same purposes." Proviso 92D.5 (SCOR: Captain Sam's Spit), same page: "Any funds appropriated or authorized in this act for the acquisition of property or settlement of litigation related to Captain Sam's Spit shall expire at the end of the fiscal year and may not be carried forward or reauthorized without the approval of the General Assembly through subsequent legislation." A programmatic search of both acts for language forbidding carry-forward returned four candidates in the new act; read in full, the other three are a scope carve-out (65.30), an exemption from fiscal-year limits (81.2), and a prohibition on withholding services in order to carry funds (117.23). 92D.5 is the only proviso in either act that stops money from carrying forward, and it has no counterpart in the FY2025-26 act.

On the lapse rule: the State Treasurer's audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, note 2, state that unexpended State General Fund monies as of June 30 automatically lapse to the State General Fund on July 1 unless the General Assembly authorizes carrying them over to the next fiscal year.

The count is of provisos that grant an agency authority to carry unspent money past June 30, compiled from Part 1B of H.5126, the General Appropriations Act for FY2026-27, as ratified August 11, 2026 (R.276), and hand-checked row by row against the ratified text on September 3, 2026. That act's count is 280. The prior year's count, 269, is from Part 1B of H.4025 as ratified, hand-checked August 11, 2026, and is the figure this series published on August 25. The same parse produced both counts and was validated by reproducing the August figures exactly. Sentences that mention carried-forward money without granting the authority to carry it are excluded from both counts under the same rule; there are 17 such sentences this year and there were 12 last year. Thirteen provisos in the new act grant carry-forward authority with no counterpart in the old act; two provisos in the old act granting it have no counterpart in the new one. One title change, the Rural Teacher Recruiting Incentive becoming the Rural Teacher Recruiting and Retention Incentive, is treated as the same proviso.

The Governor vetoed fourteen items in H.5126 on August 17, 2026. As this piece publishes, the General Assembly has not acted on those vetoes. One of the 280 provisos counted here, 1A.69 (High-Dosage Tutoring), is among the vetoed items. If that veto is sustained the count becomes 279. The count reported here is the act as ratified.

The $3.12 billion is the Office of the Comptroller General's year-end report, August 18, 2026, "Budgetary General Fund, Appropriations and Expenditures, Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2026 (Unaudited)," report page 4, appropriations carried forward to 2027: $3,123,389,420. The same report's page 5 sorts it into $2,945,996,546 of special carry-forwards, which it defines as balances that provisos in Part 1B allow certain agencies to carry forward, and $177,392,874 under proviso 117.23's general ten percent authority. The pairing of this balance with this year's 280 sentences follows the basis this series used on August 25: the sentences counted are the permissions in force while the money is held, and 117.23 is one of the 280.

The seven-year series counts every proviso whose text contains carryforward language, by the same programmatic method in each ratified act: FY2000-01 (H.4775) 109; FY2005-06 (H.3716) 160; FY2010-11 (H.4657) 188; FY2015-16 (H.3701) 212; FY2019-20 (H.4000, standing in for FY2020-21, which had no ratified act) 233; FY2025-26 (H.4025) 281; FY2026-27 (H.5126) 297. The 269 and 280 in the body are the two most recent years after a second pass in which each row was read and rows that mention carried money without granting the authority to carry it were removed. That second pass has not been run on the five earlier years, so the series is stated on the uniform first-pass basis; on that basis last year is 281 and this year 297.

The two new provisos quoted: 65.31 (CORR: Carry Forward Authorization), printed page 441; 49.23 (PRT: Regional Promotions Carry Forward), page 406.

The merger: Sections 35, 36, and 37 of the FY2025-26 act became Section 34 of the FY2026-27 act, J080, Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities. Ten carry-forward provisos in the three old sections; ten in the new one. The lease provisos are 34.12 (Office of Mental Health), 34.26 (Office of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities), and 34.33 (Office of Substance Use Services), printed pages 381, 383, and 384, each carrying the sentence "These funds shall be carried forward into the succeeding fiscal year and used for the same purpose." Their FY2025-26 predecessors were 35.12, 36.13, and 37.6.

The renumbering: in the FY2025-26 act, proviso 1.19 printed the word "DELETED." In the FY2026-27 act the sequence closes over it. Of 106 Section 1 provisos matched across the two acts, 88 carry different numbers and 18 carry the same. Proviso 1.30 (SDE: State Aid to Classrooms Reserve Fund) in the FY2025-26 act, printed page 281, is 1.29 in the FY2026-27 act, printed pages 279 to 280; 1.30 in the new act is SDE: Prohibit Advertising on School Buses. Act-wide, 298 provisos kept their exact title and changed number.

Show me the Money Episode 3

Mike Burkhold — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:51:38 GMT

Special Provisos are sentences in the budget move hundreds of millions of dollars - but they also lead to a lack of transparency on what our tax dollars are being used for.

Keeping $3.12 Billion in Change

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:02:35 GMT

Fourth in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.

South Carolina’s state government did not spend $3.17 billion of the money it was cleared to spend last year.

Of that $3.17 billion, $49 million went back to the state.

The rest stayed with the agencies.

In South Carolina, money appropriated for a year is money for that year. An agency that does not spend it by June 30 loses it. That is called lapsing, and it is the default. On July 1 the money goes back to the General Fund on its own, except where some sentence in the budget says it can stay. Then the legislature decides all over again next January what to do with it.1

Last year the default returned 1.5 cents of every unspent dollar. Sentences said the other 98.5 cents could stay with the agencies. That is called carrying it forward.2

The year before, the default returned half a cent. Agencies held $3.44 billion they did not spend and returned $18.9 million.3

The rule that sends the money back to the General Fund is still on the books. Nobody repealed it. What happened instead is that the legislature wrote exceptions to it, one sentence at a time, in the part of the budget called Part 1B.

Those sentences are provisos, and they are short. One proviso, 117.23, lets any agency hold up to ten percent of its original appropriation regardless of purpose. That one is the small door. It accounted for $177 million of what stayed last year.

The rest, $2.9 billion, walked through doors built one at a time. The Comptroller General’s report calls that money “special carry-forwards” and defines it as balances that provisos in Part 1B let particular agencies keep. Each one is a sentence written for a specific agency, fund, or program, and each one was voted on inside a budget that runs almost six hundred pages.4

The Department of Transportation carried forward $558.9 million. Higher education carried $507.1 million, Commerce $468.7 million, the Ports Authority $144.0 million. The Department of Education carried $186.2 million and sent back $1.2 million.5

None of this is hidden. The Comptroller General publishes the report every August and posts it on his website, and any citizen can read the same page I did. But the page gives a sum for each department and nothing underneath it. It says which agencies kept money without saying which provisos let them, what it was for, how long it has been sitting, or whether the programs it paid for are still running.

I have asked legislators whether they have that breakdown. The ones I have asked do not.

So the state can tell you that $3.12 billion stayed with the agencies. It cannot or does not tell you why.

An unspent dollar that returns to the General Fund is there in January, where your legislators can put it toward roads, schools, or tax cuts. A dollar that stays with the agencies does not. It is already spoken for by a sentence somebody wrote years ago, and the argument over it happened before most people knew there was one.

You hand a contractor $1,000 for supplies for a job on your house, and the supplies come to $850. He can bring you the $150, or hold it against the next job. Either can be a fair arrangement, depending on whether you agreed to it and whether he tells you how much of your money he is holding.

That is what a lapse rule is for. It sends the leftovers back to the people who answer to voters, so they have to look at them again. When 1.5 cents comes back, the legislature is not where the decisions are being made anymore.

Which of these provisos should keep running is the legislature’s call. What this office can do is publish the list: which proviso authorized each carried-forward balance, what it was appropriated for, and how many years it has been carried. The state’s report already sorts the money by which kind of sentence let it stay, so part of that list exists somewhere.

If I am elected Comptroller General, my office will publish that list every year, agency by agency and proviso by proviso. If the accounting system does not hold the detail yet, I will work to see that it does.

Some of those balances will turn out to be doing exactly what they should. Some will not. Nobody can tell which until somebody counts.

Next week: The Count. 280 Reasons Agencies Keep $3.12 Billion of Your Tax Dollars, and Not One Explanation

Last week:

On the lapse rule, independently stated in the State Treasurer's audited financial statements for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025, note 2: any unexpended State General Fund monies as of June 30 automatically lapse to the State General Fund on July 1 unless the General Assembly authorizes carrying them over to the next fiscal year.

Office of the Comptroller General, year-end report, August 18, 2026, "Budgetary General Fund, Appropriations and Expenditures, Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2026 (Unaudited)," report page 4, Total line: appropriations per act $12,858,810,456; adjusted authorizations $17,584,862,180; actual expenditures $14,412,409,224; appropriations carried forward to 2027 $3,123,389,420; lapses, returns and vetoes $49,063,536. Adjusted authorizations less expenditures is $3,172,452,956, which equals carried forward plus lapses exactly. The $49,063,536 column combines three things the report reports together: lapses, returns and vetoes. Of that total, $44,645,802 is the Debt Service line, and $2,779,854 is Statewide Employee Benefits; neither is an operating agency. The remaining $1,637,880 is spread across eleven agencies, with Education's $1,155,670 the largest. Both schedules are marked unaudited.

Prior year, equivalent schedules in the year-end report for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2025: adjusted authorizations $17,275,682,692; actual expenditures $13,830,788,672; carried forward $3,425,987,875; lapses, returns and vetoes $18,906,145. Unspent was $3,444,894,020, of which the lapses column is 0.55 percent. The $3,425,987,875 carried forward that year is the same money the FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report reports as legislatively approved agency carryover appropriations within the budgetary General Fund balance.

Same report, "Appropriations Carried Forward to FY26-27," report page 5, Total line: special carry-forwards $2,945,996,546, general carry-forwards $177,392,874, total $3,123,389,420. The report's footnotes define special carry-forwards as balances that provisos in Part 1B of the annual Appropriations Act allow certain agencies to carry forward, and general carry-forwards as the authority in proviso 117.23 to carry forward up to ten percent of original appropriations, as that proviso defines them.

Agency figures, same report, page 5: Transportation $558,877,095; Higher Education $507,105,767; Commerce $468,654,727; Ports Authority $144,013,260; Education $186,236,666. Education's lapses, returns and vetoes figure of $1,155,670 is from page 4.

Show Me the Money Episode 2

Mike Burkhold — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:54:12 GMT

Every wonder what happens when things go wrong in Columbia. Who pays the price? In normal circumstances - no one. In exceptional circumstances people resign. But generally, we have a situation of when everyone is in charge - no one is in charge.

Follow the Bus Money

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:02:58 GMT

Third in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.

This year’s state budget gives the Department of Education $185.1 million for school buses. The number is public and easy to find.1 But that is not all the department has to spend on school buses.

The same budget carries at least eight separate provisos, special instructions that direct how money can be used. Each one lets more money flow into the bus operation, carry forward from year to year, or stay with the buses once it arrives.2 They sit scattered across hundreds of pages, and nothing in the budget puts them together.

One proviso lets unused General Fund money become bus money. When the department docks a school district’s transportation money to cover unauthorized mileage, the two can agree to move it, and it can become bus money. What the department earns selling fuel, used buses, even a whole bus shop, can become bus money. Education Improvement Act money and lottery money can become bus money too.

Money an agency does not spend by June 30 normally goes back into the state’s checkbook to be handed out again. Carryforward is what keeps that from happening, so the money stays where it is and the path stays open into the next year. Eight of them, all running one way.

Picture a garage with the family bus parked inside. The front door is the budget, and you can stand there and watch $185.1 million drive through it. The garage has eight more doors, and every one of them opens inward.

One of those doors shows how far the money can travel. This year’s budget appropriates one dollar for School Bus Purchase from the lottery, then directs to the buses all unclaimed prize money above the state’s $23.5 million estimate. The budget calls that second amount “All remaining.”3 Last year, that one-dollar line produced $14.1 million in bus-purchase money. The final figure cannot be known when the budget is adopted, because it depends on how much prize money nobody comes to collect.

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That is not hidden. It is simply not included in the $185.1 million number, and that is the challenge with the way South Carolina uses provisos and carryforward. The legislature can print an appropriation in one place, create another source of money somewhere else, and allow money to carry forward. Every step of that is lawful, and each provision may make sense by itself. Nothing in the rules requires anyone to gather the pieces, so they stay scattered across the act. Taken together, they build a budget that cannot tell you what a program actually has available to spend.

The buses are a good example because South Carolina owns and maintains its entire fleet, about 5,700 buses.4 For decades no law required replacing them on any schedule, and when that requirement finally passed in 2007, the money came in fits and starts.5 When you cannot count on the money, you take what you can get when you can get it. Funding has improved since, with more than 4,850 buses added over the past decade.6 The extra doors are all still open in that budget, and seven of the eight sit in the one passed this summer.

The Department of Education’s own accountability report spreads bus spending across at least seven lines.7 You have to find them and add them up yourself. Even then you are looking at what was spent, never at one number showing what the system had available to spend.

Nobody is hiding this. Some of the money cannot be known in June, because it depends on what the department does not spend, what lottery players never claim, and what the bus shops earn. The trouble is what happens next. Nobody adds it up afterward either.

The buses are one program in one agency. This year’s budget carries 269 carryforward provisos like these, by our line-by-line count.8 The buses are not the problem. They are the example. If one program can have eight separate paths for money to arrive, stay and roll forward with no page showing the total, ask what happens when that practice runs 269 times.

You can read every page the legislature passed and still not know where the money goes, when it gets there, or how much is left. Money taken out of a paycheck should not require a scavenger hunt to follow.

The state’s books already hold these numbers. I am running for Comptroller General, and when I take office I will put them on one page, program by program, where a taxpayer can find them.

A budget nobody can add up is a budget nobody can manage.

Next Week: Keeping $3.12 Billion in Change

Last week:

The proviso file behind this piece was built by the campaign’s volunteer research team. The work in this series is theirs as much as mine.

Ratified FY2025-26 General Appropriations Act (H.4025), Part 1A, Section 1 (H630), pg. 2. VII.B Bus Shops: $170,327,375 total funds. VII.C Buses: $14,777,299. Total VII: $185,104,674. Under Proviso 1.17, funds in the two bus lines are interchangeable for bus purchases.

All from the ratified FY2025-26 act. Provisos 1.35 (carry forward and expend any General Fund balances for school bus transportation); 1.1 (transfer prohibition; the exception lets the department transfer funds deducted and retained from a school district's transportation allocation to reimburse the cost of unauthorized mileage, the transfer to be agreed upon by both the district and the department, and those funds may be transferred into the school bus transportation operating account); 1.8 (collect, expend, and carry forward revenue including sale of fuel and sale of used school buses); 1.53 (retain proceeds from sale of any bus shop, for transportation purposes); 1.17 (bus fuel, parts, maintenance, and purchase funds carried forward year to year); 1A.63 (prior-year EIA cash and unappropriated EIA funds carried forward and spent in a required order, with item (2) directing $35,000,000 to the Department of Education for school buses); 3.7 (all Education Lottery Account revenue carried forward); 1.12 (bus shops sell maintenance and fuel to districts and public agencies on a cost-reimbursable-plus basis, generating the revenue Proviso 1.8 retains). Ratified pages: 1.1 p. 269; 1.8 pp. 275-276; 1.12 p. 276; 1.17 p. 277; 1.35 p. 284; 1.53 p. 292; 1A.63 pp. 330-331; 3.7 pp. 335-336. Proviso numbers are specific to this year's act and change from year to year.

Ratified FY2025-26 act, Proviso 3.7(E)(4) and 3.7(F), pp. 335-336: School Bus Purchase appropriated at $1, with unclaimed prize funds above the Board of Economic Advisors estimate of $23,500,000 directed to School Bus Purchase as "All remaining." SCDE's compliance memo reports $14,119,074 disbursed for School Bus Purchase in FY2024-25. The $1 is this year's appropriation; the $14.1 million is last year's disbursement. Other bus money outside the $185.1 million front door includes Part 1A Section VIII.G, Transportation (EIA), $22,032,195

Legislative Audit Council, A Review of South Carolina School Bus Operations, April 2001 (LAC/SDE-00-1), synopsis p. v and p. 2, for the state-ownership finding. Fleet count: about 5,700 state-owned buses (SCDE news release, October 21, 2025).

LAC 2001, p. 13 (no formal replacement schedule then in law); Act 79 of 2007, codified at S.C. Code § 59-67-580(A); SCDE, Update on South Carolina's School Bus Fleet, November 2016, p. 1 (state ownership since the 1950s) and p. 2 (purchase table: FY2008-09 and FY2011-12 zero ordered and zero delivered; FY2009-10 and FY2010-11 two hybrids each; the table's asterisk notes a purchase contract was in the procurement process during FY2011-12; ten-year totals 2,267 ordered against a 3,800 target).

SCDE 2024 Annual Accountability Report (H630), discussion p. 3 (288 buses replaced in fiscal 2024); SCDE/SCDPS release, October 21, 2025 (more than 4,850 buses added over the decade; average fleet age cut roughly in half).

SCDE 2024 Annual Accountability Report, Budget Data, pp. 17-22, FY2024 actual expenditures: Bus Shops $167,194,376; EIA Transportation $21,505,154; School Buses $15,557,086; Bus Purchases $4,490,713; EAA Transportation $2,400,732; Bus Leases $2,132,954; EEDA Transportation $494,370. An eighth line, Support Operations, mixes bus costs with nutrition, building, and other services and cannot be cleanly assigned.

The count is of carryforward provisos in Part 1B of the ratified FY2025-26 General Appropriations Act, from the campaign's line-by-line read of the act; published in this series August 25 ("The Pile of Money").

Show me the Money - Episode 1

Mike Burkhold — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:34:23 GMT

I want you to be among the first to know: I just launched a new show to explain where your tax dollars are going.

It’s called Show Me the Money, and the first episode is live now. Every episode, I’m going to break down where South Carolina’s tax dollars actually go and whether you’re getting what you paid for.

Here’s why I’m starting with this. The Comptroller General’s office has two jobs. The first is accountant. The second is watchdog. Too many people treat it like the office is just there to keep the books and stay quiet. I don’t think that’s good enough and in this first episode I explain why the office has to be more than a passive bookkeeper and how I plan to turn it into an active taxpayer watchdog.

South Carolina publishes thousands of pages of financial reports every year. Almost nobody reads them. I do.

I follow the money, and I explain what I find in plain English, the kind of English you don’t need a law degree or a lobbyist to understand.

That’s the whole point of this show. Open the books. Follow the money. Say it straight.

I’m going to keep opening the books, protecting your tax dollars and working to make South Carolina the best financially run state in America.

Thanks for being with me on this.

Mike Burkhold - The Man Who Counts

www.burkhold.net

The Growth

Mike Burkhold — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:02:24 GMT

Second in a series on provisos, the short instructions in the state budget that move money and keep it moving.

Every year South Carolina publishes its financial report, and every year, in the notes, it prints the same sentence: “Unexpended appropriations lapse on July 31 unless the department or agency is given specific authorization to carry them forward to the next fiscal year.” Money an agency did not spend goes back, unless somebody gave it permission to keep it.

Word for word, in every report from 2009 through 2025. We pulled all seventeen and read the page in each.1

In the first of those years the state’s main operating account, the one that sentence governs, ended with $120 million in it. In 2025 it ended with $6.6 billion.2 Same rule, 54 times the money.

The money did not creep up. For most of that run the account behaved the way the rule suggests it should. It held $120 million in 2009 because the recession had drained it, which is what a cushion is for. It rebuilt over the next three years to about a billion dollars, and then it sat. From 2013 through 2018, six straight years, it stayed between $1.0 and $1.2 billion.3

Then two years moved it and nothing has moved it back. In 2019 it climbed to $1.7 billion. In 2021 it doubled. In 2022 it nearly doubled again, to $6.9 billion.4 The money came from a boom in state tax collections. When it landed, what did the system do with it?

It absorbed it. It has kept it every year since.

None of this needs a villain to explain it. An agency keeps money it is not spending for the reason you would give in its place. A cushion means a bad year does not become a crisis, and a lean budget does not become a layoff. An agency head who could build one and didn’t would be failing his own people. And this is not a government trait. I ran a company for seventeen years, and pushing back on departments that wanted more was my job. Once a year somebody sat down with each one and asked what it needed, and that conversation was the only reason money came back. Nobody looked forward to it. In state government that job belongs to the legislature.

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And the state does pull money back sometimes. The same note that carries the lapse rule also lets the budget office cut spending the legislature already approved, if that is what it takes to prevent a deficit.5 A bad enough year spends the cushions, the way 2009 did, and 2024 took more than $800 million off the balance. A vote can do it too: a billion dollars went back to taxpayers in 2023.6 Every one of those took a crisis or a decision. Nothing sends money back on its own.

What the $6.6 billion is for depends on which part you mean. About $1.4 billion of it is set aside in the three reserve funds the state counts, and those are filled by rule and reported in one place. The rest is the $3.4 billion agencies kept under sentences in the budget’s fine print and $1.7 billion assigned to nothing.7 No formula sets either one, and no document says what the right level would be.

None of that money went anywhere. It is all in the one account, and what carries forward is the permission to spend it.8

The same habit runs in your own house in a smaller way. Somewhere on your bank statement is a charge that renews every month for something the family quit using a long time ago. Renewing takes nothing. Stopping it takes a decision, an account, and a phone call. So it renews, and not because anyone wants it. The budget works the same way.

Nobody has any incentive to send money back.

Outside a crisis, only the legislature can send kept money back to the General Fund, the state’s main account, and that has to happen every year, as a habit, because the keeping happens every year, as a habit. But nobody sends back a total that never reaches the budget. The sentences pass one at a time, each easy to defend on its own, and the total never lands on a page. A number nobody adds up is a number nobody can act on.

That money started in your paycheck. It came out before you ever saw it, and while it was yours you knew what every dollar of it was for. It has sat since in an account that grew 54 times over under a sentence that never changed a word. You counted it when it was yours. As Comptroller General, I will count it every year and publish the total.

Next week: Follow the Bus Money

Last week:

The proviso file behind this piece was built by the campaign’s volunteer research team. The work in this series is theirs as much as mine.

"Unexpended appropriations lapse on July 31 unless the department or agency is given specific authorization to carry them forward to the next fiscal year." Notes to Required Supplementary Information, Budgetary, Note 4, in the state's annual financial report for each fiscal year 2009 through 2025. FY2025 edition, printed page 199; FY2016 edition, printed page 172. The sentence is identical in all seventeen editions. The same rule appears in different words as far back as the FY2000 report, transmittal letter, pages 14 and 15.

$120,512,000 at June 30, 2009 and $6,604,224,000 at June 30, 2025. Budgetary Comparison Schedule (Non-GAAP Budgetary Basis), Budgetary General Fund, page 145 of the FY2009 report and page 194 of the FY2025 report. The schedules print in thousands, so on the page these read 120,512 and 6,604,224. The presentation changed during these years: the FY2009 schedule ends at the budgetary ending balance, and a reservation section appears in later editions. The FY2025 figure is the balance after reservation, which is the figure this series uses for every year that states one; FY2025's ending balance before reservations was $6,246,805,000. This is the state's own published schedule; it sits in required supplementary information rather than under the auditor's opinion, and it is checkable by anyone. The state reports the General Fund a second way in the same report, on a broader accounting basis that sweeps in money the budget handles separately. Both are correct. This piece uses the budget version throughout, because that is the account the legislature votes on and the one the leftover sits in.

Same schedule, each year’s report: $1,046,090,000 (2013), $1,163,275,000 (2014), $1,193,825,000 (2015), $1,131,309,000 (2016), $1,076,471,000 (2017), $1,187,174,000 (2018). The rebuild years were $246,167,000 (2010), $711,742,000 (2011), and $1,053,039,000 (2012). The FY2012 schedule states its ending balance before the reservation presentation appears in later editions, so 2012 is described here only as about a billion dollars. The 2009 low is the recession’s: the FY2009 report’s Management’s Discussion and Analysis, printed page 29, states that the year ended in a budgetary deficit, that the deficit was funded by drawing down the entire General and Capital Reserve funds, and that revenues fell $848,221,000, or 13.23 percent, from the prior year.

What this series measures is the whole budgetary General Fund ending balance, which the state publishes on the same basis every year. It is not a measure of agency carryforward by itself. Carryforward is one component of the balance, $3,426,000,000 of the $6,604,224,000 at June 30, 2025, and the state states that composition in its transmittal letter rather than on the schedule. A year-by-year series of the carryforward component alone would be a different series and could have a different shape. Nothing here is a claim about it.

$1,708,756,000 (2019), $1,804,723,000 (2020), $3,615,308,000 (2021), $6,865,938,000 (2022). The 2022 figure is the highest in the series; the account stood at $6,845,879,000 in 2023, $6,019,850,000 in 2024, and $6,604,224,000 in 2025.

"The authority to reduce enacted appropriations is provided to the Executive Budget Office if it is deemed necessary to prevent a deficit." FY2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, Notes to the Required Supplementary Information, Budgetary, Note 2, printed page 199, the same page that carries the lapse rule quoted above. The budget office referred to is the Executive Budget Office. The same note adds that the State Board of Economic Advisors may approve revisions of estimated revenues for the Budgetary General Fund during the year.

The balance fell $826,029,000 between June 30, 2023 and June 30, 2024, and that year's spending ran $747,661,000 ahead of that year's revenue. The $1 billion taxpayer rebate appears in the reservation detail of the FY2023 schedule. Same schedules and same basis as the figures above, in the FY2023 and FY2024 reports.

Composition of the $6,604,224,000 as of June 30, 2025, from the FY2025 report's transmittal letter, page 9: agency carryover appropriations approved by the legislature $3,426,000,000; General Reserve Fund $739,568,000; Capital Reserve Fund $369,784,000; Contingency Reserve $332,294,000; unassigned surplus $1,736,000,000.

The general carryforward proviso authorizes each agency "to carry forward unspent general fund appropriations from the prior fiscal year into the current fiscal year, up to a maximum of ten percent of its original general fund appropriations less any appropriation reductions for the current fiscal year." H.4025, General Appropriations Act for FY2025-26, Part 1B, Proviso 117.23, as ratified, page 506, confirmed against the rendered page image August 13, 2026. An appropriation is authority to draw money from the General Fund, so what carries forward is that authority over money held in the fund. The state's own reporting shows the same thing from the other side: the carried-forward total is stated as a component of the General Fund's ending balance rather than as a transfer out of it.