Give the state credit for the word, because it is the honest one. Announced means a company stood at an announcement and said what it intends to spend building here and how many people it intends to hire. Some of those intentions come true, some come in smaller, and some never happen at all, which is normal business and nobody’s scandal. Every state’s commerce department keeps score this way, so South Carolina is not unusual. The question is what happens to the number after the announcement, and that question has an official answer.

The state’s auditors gave it in 2020, in plain words: the annual reports and press releases “only include projected figures for job creation and capital investment,” and neither Commerce nor the Coordinating Council that approves the incentives “publish actual job creation and capital investment data.” Part of that got fixed. After the audit, the Council began publishing results for finished deals, and this series has already covered them: grants that closed over the past decade reported 115 percent of the jobs required, numbers certified by the companies themselves. That is a real improvement, and it lives in an annual report almost nobody reads. The January scoreboard, the one number that makes every front page in the state, still counts what was announced.

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The auditors also asked for the harder thing: look back at completed projects and measure whether the incentives actually pay for themselves, the announced billions converted into a return the public can see. When the auditors checked back in 2024, Commerce’s answer was on the record: it “has evaluated this recommendation and has not found a credible way to conduct an effective ‘look back’ analysis for any given project.” Put those two sentences side by side. The same system that can tell you the year’s promises came to $9.12 billion, not nine, not nine and a quarter, says that measuring what came back cannot credibly be done.

The same pattern shows up inside the jobs number. The scoreboard counts more than 8,100 announced jobs; it does not say what the jobs pay. The auditors recommended in 2020 that the state publish the median wage of the new jobs it pays incentives for. When they checked back in 2024, the answer was that Commerce is considering it once its reports move online. Six years of decimal precision on how many jobs were promised, and “considering” on what the jobs pay.

Remember whose money sits under the scoreboard. The state pays for this recruiting two ways. The grants are checks from the state treasury. The credits are income tax withheld from workers’ paychecks that the state lets companies keep, more than $200 million of it in the decade the auditors reviewed. The announcements are the public case for all of it, the reason the programs exist and grow. You know how this works at home. A promised raise is good news, and you still do not spend it until it shows up in the paycheck. The state’s scoreboard counts the raise the day it is promised. It keeps one column, what was promised, to the second decimal, forever. The column for what came back stays empty, and the office that keeps the scoreboard says it has not found a credible way to fill it in.

Next January the precision will return, another billion-dollar figure quoted in every paper in the state, and the same word will be printed in front of it. “Announced”. Now you know what the word means, and you know the question the scoreboard does not answer: what came back.

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Next week: The Raise. South Carolina's operating budget doubled in ten years. More people and higher prices explain about half of it.

Last week:

Sources: S.C. Department of Commerce and Office of the Governor, 2025 industry recruitment results release, January 14, 2026 ($9.12 billion announced capital investment, 82 announced projects, more than 8,100 announced new jobs); prior-year releases January 2023, January 2024, January 2025 (announced qualifier on each year’s headline figure). Legislative Audit Council, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, June 2020, p. 23 (projected-figures finding). Legislative Audit Council, Follow-Up Review, August 2024, p. 2 (look-back recommendation, not implemented, quoted; median-wage recommendation, not implemented). Coordinating Council for Economic Development, 2025 Annual Report of Fund Activity, p. 25 (115 percent, closed grants, company-certified).

The credit works like this. When a company promises new jobs, the state lets it keep part of the income tax withheld from its workers’ paychecks. The program calls these job development credits, JDCs for short. The money never reaches the treasury, so the credit costs the state the same way a check would. Over the decade the auditors reviewed, 2009 through 2019, 415 companies claimed more than $200 million of it. The claims live in the Revenue Department’s tax records. The sentence hands the auditors the records of every state agency, then takes one set back: “with the exception of reports and returns of the South Carolina Department of Revenue.” The auditors’ 2020 report says what that did to their review: it left them “prevented from knowing if a company has claimed any JDCs at all.”

Sit with that. Since the auditors could not know who claimed the credit, they could not pull one company’s claim and test it against the jobs. Everything they learned about the program’s checking, they learned by interviewing the people who run it.

The interviews were not comforting. Commerce officials called the program risk-free because the Revenue Department is required by law to audit every company with a large claim. Revenue’s own staff said many of those audits were not happening, and that in the audits that did happen, something was wrong in up to 95 percent of the claims. So the checking the auditors were locked out of was the checking that kept finding problems. You would not accept this at your own house. You hire an inspector for the whole place, and the law locks the one room where the checkbook is kept.

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The auditors asked the General Assembly for exactly one thing in 2020: amend the sentence so they can see the Revenue Department’s tax records when an audit requires it. Six years later, the amendment remains unwritten.

State law already seals the auditors' own records. Company payroll is certainly private information, and it should be treated that way, but state auditors handle private information as a matter of routine, from every agency except the Revenue Department, and an auditor who leaks faces criminal penalties. I know this work from the inside: I ran a healthcare company that processed millions of claims carrying patients' private health information, and we kept it private, with systems built for that and access limited to what the job required. Confidential and off-limits are not the same thing. The sentence only decides whether the state's own checkers may look.

And the General Assembly has been in the room. Since 2019, every session has seen a bill to give the auditors subpoena power, the power to make an agency hand over records and answer questions under oath. The latest version of the bill nearly passed this spring: the House voted for it 112 to 0, the Senate 46 to 0, and the two sides parted in May over a procedural detail. But a subpoena only reaches records the law lets the auditors see, and the sentence is the law that keeps the tax records off that list. Every version of the bill copies the sentence forward word for word. Three unanimous roll calls for subpoena power. Not one vote, ever, to let the auditors see the Revenue Department records necessary to validate the credits.

Amending the sentence is not part of the job I am asking for; it belongs to the General Assembly, and it may be the cheapest fix in this whole series. The credit is paid with state income tax taken out of workers’ paychecks before the workers ever see it. Nobody asked them. The least they are owed back is that somebody independent of the program gets to count whether the jobs those dollars bought are real. Today that count is against the law. The problem is one sentence in the code. The repair is one sentence too, and somebody in the General Assembly gets to be the one who writes it.

Added August 4: the paragraph on the case for taxpayer confidentiality, in response to a reader's question.

Next week: Announced

Last week:

Sources: Legislative Audit Council, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, June 2020: the confidentiality bar and the auditors’ statement pp. 53-54; DOR audit staffing, frequency, and discrepancy rate pp. 51-52; JDC claims and program scope pp. 51-55; Recommendation 21 p. 55. S.C. Code §2-15-61. H.4337, South Carolina General Assembly, 2025-2026 session, legislative record at scstatehouse.gov.

In 2020, the state’s auditors finished their review of South Carolina’s business incentive programs and left behind thirty-nine fixes, addressed to the Department of Commerce, the council that approves the grants, the Department of Revenue, and the General Assembly itself. In August 2024, they went back and counted: seventeen done, six partly done, fourteen not done, two no longer applicable. Four years is enough time to know which items an agency intends to do. The fourteen are the story, because of what they have in common.

First, give the record its due. Take the Department of Revenue’s audit shop. It was down to one auditor for the whole tax-credit program by 2020. It has five now, and says it is completing the audits the law requires. Clawbacks and write-offs, the money taken back and the money given up on, started appearing in the Council’s annual report in 2021, where before that they appeared nowhere. Those are real fixes, and an agency that intended to do nothing would not have done them.

Now look at what was declined. The recommendation to verify companies’ claimed jobs beyond their own paperwork: not implemented, with Commerce answering that the fix “is not practical to implement and would be unduly cumbersome on staff.” The recommendation to check job claims against the wage records the state already holds at the Department of Employment and Workforce, the answer key from last week’s piece: not implemented, and still no data-sharing agreement exists. The recommendation to run fraud risk assessments: not implemented, with Commerce answering that only three known grant frauds have turned up in fourteen years, all three in a county where the agency had been advised to accept more risk. That is a strange comfort. You only know about the frauds you went looking for, and looking is what was just declined. The recommendation to check, after the fact, whether the incentives pay for themselves: not implemented, with Commerce answering it has “not found a credible way” to measure it. And when the auditors pulled ten grant files at random from the newer awards, 2020 through 2024, four of the ten contained no supporting financial documents at all.

Set the two lists side by side and the pattern names itself. Not one fix the agencies adopted tests whether a promised grant job is real. Every fix that would have tested one, the extra verification, the wage-record match, the fraud screens, tax-record access for the auditors themselves, sits on the declined list. What got adopted, nearly all of it, publishes numbers. What got declined would have checked them. The state now publishes better numbers about the program. It still does not check whether the jobs behind them are real.

Here is the household version of the fourteen. A home inspector walks your house and hands you a written list of what is broken. You fix the things that show from the street, the paint, the doorbell, and you leave the crack in the foundation alone. Four years later the inspector comes back, writes down that the crack is still there, and hands you the new list. Nothing else happens. Nothing else can happen, because the inspector’s only power is to inspect again. That is the enforcement system for South Carolina’s audit findings, stated exactly: the penalty for ignoring a state audit is a second audit. And there is one difference between you and the agencies on that list. When you put off your own foundation, the penalty is real: the crack grows, and the bill is yours. Their penalty is the one you just read. The bill still lands on you.

The auditors did their job, twice, and did it well; none of this lands on them. It lands on the arrangement above them, where a finding creates no duty for anyone, so the fixes an agency likes get done and the fixes it finds cumbersome sit in a report on a shelf. Six years of your money have moved through these programs since the first inspection, counted the same way as before: by the companies that received it. You counted that money every payday, to the dollar, while it was yours. It left your check before you ever saw it, and nobody asked. What the state owes you back is small: findings that somebody must answer, and somebody whose job is to keep counting after the inspectors go home.

Next week: One Sentence in the Code

Last week:

Sources: Legislative Audit Council, Follow-Up Review of the S.C. Department of Commerce Incentive Programs, August 2024: status table and counts p. 1; job verification (Rec. 16) and look-back analysis (Rec. 10) p. 2; DEW/DOR data sharing (Rec. 17), DOR audit staffing (Rec. 20), and clawback and write-off reporting (Recs. 18-19) pp. 2-3; fraud risk assessments (Rec. 37) and grant file sample (Rec. 35) p. 4. Coordinating Council for Economic Development, 2025 Annual Report of Fund Activity, March 2026: clawback and write-off disclosure pp. 26-27.

And that is not a portrait of the old days. The Coordinating Council’s own annual report, published this March, describes the process the same way today: when a company’s deadline arrives, the company certifies its own jobs and investment and sends in documentation to support its performance. Six years after the audit, the evidence still starts at the company.

Last week’s piece counted the $5.2 million the state billed for and gave up on. This week is the other half of that story: why the money went out so easily in the first place. It went out on numbers the companies wrote down themselves. The audit’s case files show where that leads: one CEO got a $1.2 million grant with a faked financial report. He was sentenced to fifteen years for fraud; the courts did their job. The paperwork did not.

Here is the part to sit with. South Carolina already owns the answer key. Every employer in the state files quarterly wage reports with the Department of Employment and Workforce, listing every worker’s name, Social Security number, wages, and hours. Checking a company’s job claims against those reports is a matter of one state agency sharing a file with another. A Commerce staff member told the auditors the Coordinating Council used to receive those reports, and stopped in the mid-1990s. Reagan’s old rule was trust but verify. For thirty years, the state has done the trusting and skipped the verifying.

Now, some things do get checked. Capital investment gets verified against a company’s property tax return, or against invoices and proofs of payment, which are harder to fake than a spreadsheet. Site visits exist for projects that renovate buildings, to confirm grant money was spent as the company represented. And on the tax-credit side, where companies keep a slice of their employees’ withholding taxes, Commerce told the auditors the program carries no risk, because the Department of Revenue is required by law to audit every company claiming more than $10,000 at least once every three years.

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Then the auditors counted the times anyone checked. The site visits stopped in September 2018 and did not resume until the auditors showed up in August 2019; twenty-one of the fifty-three visits ever made happened after the audit began. At the Department of Revenue, two auditors covered the whole tax-credit program, completing 15 to 29 audits a year while 138 to 184 companies claimed the credit, so the every-three-years rule was going unmet, and some companies had never been audited at all. And the audits that did happen produced the most important number in this piece: DOR staff told the auditors that discrepancies turn up in as many as 95 percent of them. Companies claiming past the per-employee cap. Companies claiming credits for workers no longer there. In the one corner of the program where somebody looked, almost every file had something wrong in it.

A Commerce official gave the auditors the honest name for the tax-credit side, and it is on page 54 of the report: the state relies on the “honor system” for the jobs and investment a company claims on its quarterly reports. Their word, in the record.

Which brings us back to the good news from last week, the Council’s own scorecard showing companies delivered 115 percent of the jobs they promised. Where does a number like that come from? From the end of the process described above: the company certifies, the company supplies the backup, and the staff reviews what the company sent. The auditors also asked how job numbers get entered into Commerce’s database and from what source documents, and the answer was that no written procedures existed. So the scorecard is true in exactly one sense: it is truly what the companies certified. Every teacher who ever let a class grade its own quiz knows what those scores come back looking like.

None of this says the jobs are fake. Most of them are probably real, and that is what makes the arrangement unfair to everyone, including every honest company whose real jobs are now vouched for by the same system that vouched for a faked financial report. The reason nobody checks is the usual one. Checking is work, and the money at stake belongs to nobody in the room. You checked your own bank statement against your checkbook every month of your working life, because the money was yours. The state lent yours out and took the borrower’s word for what came back, and it has taken that word, on the record, since the mid-1990s.

Next week: The Second Inspection

Last week:

Sources: Legislative Audit Council, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, June 2020: verification of job claims and DEW wage reports pp. 41-42; job data entry procedures p. 18; capital investment and site-visit verification p. 42; fraud case file p. 49; site visits p. 42; DOR audit staffing and frequency pp. 51-52; discrepancy rate p. 52; “honor system” p. 54. Coordinating Council for Economic Development, 2025 Annual Report of Fund Activity, March 2026: certification and closeout process pp. 22-24; performance history (115%) p. 25.

When a company takes a grant from South Carolina and does not deliver the jobs it promised, the contract already says what happens next. There is a formula, written into the deal, for how much of the money the state takes back. Over the ten years auditors examined, that formula meant the state could have demanded about $17 million from companies that fell short. The state asked for $9.3 million, collected $7.8 million, and wrote off $5.2 million as money it will never see.

Those numbers come from one document: the Legislative Audit Council’s June 2020 review of the incentive programs run through the Department of Commerce. The state pays companies to move here or expand, in exchange for a promise: this many jobs, this much investment, by this date. A body called the Coordinating Council for Economic Development approves the grants, and when a company falls short, the Council collects. And the Council is supposed to be working for you. You are the one who put up the money.

The Council’s own newest report has good news for the program, and that goes first. By the Council’s count, the 289 grants finished over the last decade created 115 percent of the jobs they promised and 139 percent of the promised investment. On paper, most companies over-deliver. The program is not a failure, and this piece is not about the companies that kept their word. It is about the smaller pile, because the smaller pile is where you find out what happens when a promise to you gets broken.

Start with why the state asked for $9.3 million when its own formula supported $17 million. The contract has a second clause. A company that falls short can hand in paperwork showing it made a good-faith effort, and if the county that received the grant and the Council decide, in the contract’s words, “in their sole discretion,” that the circumstances excuse the shortfall, the agreement gets rewritten to match what happened. The state’s auditors read that clause and said plainly what it amounts to: flexibility to reduce or waive any repayment that would otherwise be required. Their words, page 46. About $7.7 million of the gap between could-have and did is that clause at work.

What counts as an excuse? The auditors asked that too, and a Commerce staff member gave examples: job requirements are hard to fill in rural counties, South Carolina’s low unemployment makes it hard for some companies to find workers, construction runs late, and downturns change business plans. Some of those are real hardships; a rural county’s labor pool is what it is. But look at the whole list together. Between a thin rural labor pool and a booming state’s empty one, it covers every county in every year, and delays and downturns cover every project in every economy. An excuse list that broad means the company is never really on the hook. The risk lands back on the person the formula was supposed to protect, and that person is you. And the second excuse deserves one more beat: the program exists because the state wants more jobs, and the excuse it accepts for missing jobs is that there was nobody left to hire.

Now ask who holds the discretion. The Council has thirteen seats, with the Secretary of Commerce in the chair. Ten belong to agency heads and appointed board chairmen. One statewide elected official has a seat, the Commissioner of Agriculture. And in 2021, the budget year after this audit landed, the legislature added the chairmen of its two budget committees, putting its own eyes in the room. None of that is a knock on anyone at that table. It is just how the table is built: when a debt owed to you gets forgiven, this is the room that decides, ten of its thirteen members answer to no voter, and the only people who check the forgiving are the people doing it.

Then there is the $5.2 million the state billed for and gave up on. In the years the auditors examined, when a company quit paying or quit answering, nothing followed, because nothing had to. Since then the Council has added a tool: dead debts now go to the state’s tax-collection program, called GEAR. Its whole history: 26 companies sent there, $887,426 brought back. In one file closed last year, GEAR recovered exactly $53, and the Council wrote off the remaining $168,697. And the clause is still in use: in 2025 the Council waived or wrote off four repayments totaling $352,475. Credit where it is due, and it is due: every number in this paragraph is public because the Council itself publishes it.

Now say it in household terms. Suppose you handed your savings to a man to lend out for you, under signed agreements that spell out exactly what each borrower owes back if he breaks his promise. Then you learn the fine print lets that man forgive any debt he wants, on his own say-so. And when a borrower stops paying, the man you hired hardly ever collects a dime. You would fire that man by Friday. Not because he is dishonest, but because you would never know if he were.

The auditors did not find a villain running the program, and the story does not need one. They found a repayment formula that was a suggestion, an excuse list that covers every county in every year, and a discretion nobody above the room reviews. How the money went out in the first place is a story of its own, and it is next week’s. You counted every dollar of that money while it was yours, because it was yours. Once it crossed into the state’s hands, whether it came back at all was left to somebody’s sole discretion, and $5.2 million owed to the people of South Carolina was money nobody ever had to collect.

Next week: The Honor System

Last week: The Hat Switch

Sources: Legislative Audit Council, Review of Incentive Programs Administered by the S.C. Department of Commerce, June 2020: repayment formula, waiver clause, and staff examples of waiver circumstances pp. 46-47; Chart 3.3 (clawbacks and write-offs) p. 47. Coordinating Council for Economic Development, 2025 Annual Report of Fund Activity, March 2026: membership pp. 4-6; performance history (115%/139%) p. 25; GEAR collections pp. 24, 27 and Exhibit F; 2025 waivers and write-offs p. 27 and Exhibit F.

Here’s what the panels show.

An employee in USC’s economic engagement office owned a private company. That company was hired onto a state grant the same office ran, as a paid subcontractor, for $517,500. The chart shows the grant also paid that employee $9,106 directly, on top of what his company got. University policy says a conflict like that has to be disclosed. It wasn’t.

In April 2021, the university’s own audit office caught it. It found the conflict, found that an official had never disclosed it, and called that a violation of USC policy. In plain terms, the university said no. An office paying a company its own employee owned could not stand.

Now watch what the official did with that no.

He withdrew the university’s application to renew the grant. On paper, that’s compliance. But he had a second job: manager of the nonprofit next door, the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator. The Incubator doesn’t run on USC’s purchasing rules or USC’s conflict policy. And keep in mind what those rules are. They’re not red tape. They’re the public’s only say in how its own money gets spent. So he took the grant there, without the auditors knowing, and signed the contract himself as Incubator manager. The grant came back in through the nonprofit’s door. Then the Incubator hired the same company, owned by the same coworker, for the same kind of work. Only now it was $675,000 instead of $517,500.

Told no, he didn’t argue. He just moved the deal next door, where the no couldn’t reach him, and did it anyway. Bigger.

The auditors reconstructed his plan from the documents and put it right in the cartoon, in a thought bubble over his head: withdraw the university’s application, have the Incubator apply instead. He didn’t stumble into a loophole. He walked to it.

Any parent knows this move. You tell your son he can’t buy that video game. So he hands the money to his best friend, the friend buys the game, and it stays over at the friend’s house. When you find out, he tells you he didn’t buy it. And technically, he didn’t.

Now listen to USC’s answer. The university says some of what the auditors flagged happened at organizations it doesn’t legally control, the Incubator among them. That’s the friend’s house. And it might even hold up, except for one detail: the man who moved the grant there was a USC official, and he was a manager at the friend’s house too. He signed for the university one day and for the nonprofit the next. “We have no control over that organization” is a strange defense when the man who signed its contract was your own official.

And here’s the question this story leaves me with, the one I can’t shake. Did this official invent the move, or did he learn it somewhere? Is parking a deal in the nonprofit next door a trick one man figured out, or is it how business gets done around our public universities when the rules say no? How many other grants have made this same trip?

I can’t tell you. Nobody can. And that’s not a dodge, it’s the finding. The university’s books and the nonprofit’s books are separate, and no one in this story could read both at once. The auditors only caught this one because senators ordered a review. Every other deal that walked out the university’s door and in through a nonprofit’s is sitting in a set of books nobody’s required to open.

The gap between the university’s books and the nonprofit’s books is where this money disappeared from view. It started as yours, taken from your paycheck without anyone asking. The rules were the only protection you were promised. This deal slipped through a door those rules never covered. It was counted only once, three years later, because senators ordered a special review the normal system never requires.

Luck is not a bookkeeping system. The Comptroller General keeps the state’s books, and those books record money the moment it leaves an agency, including money that goes to a nonprofit next door. Making those transfers visible, agency by agency and in plain numbers, is the job I’m seeking.

Next week: The Money That Never Came Back

Last week:

The Eight Who Never Worked

Source: South Carolina Legislative Audit Council, A Review of the Office of Economic Engagement of the University of South Carolina and its Affiliation with the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and the South Carolina Research Foundation (December 2024), pages 104–106 and Chart 5.6. Read it: https://lac.sc.gov/node/271

Eight people were paid from the computer lab grant. All eight told the state’s auditors they never worked on it.

That is $286,553 in salaries and benefits, charged to a federal grant meant to put computers in front of children who did not have them. The money is real. It is not the worst part of this story. The paperwork is.

A grant like this one runs on a document called a time-and-effort report. An employee signs it to certify that his pay lines up with the work he actually did on the grant. The report exists for one reason. It is the proof that grant money paid for grant work, so nobody has to stand over each person and watch the hours go by.

Seven of the eight had signed one. Each had certified, in writing, that he worked on this project. Then all eight told the auditors they had not.

The records said one thing. The people said another. The records were the ones that were wrong.

Put it in terms you live with. You pay a handyman up front for a list of jobs around the house. The gutters, the back step, the loose fence post. None of it gets done. Then he hands you an invoice with every line checked off and his name signed at the bottom. The paper says the work happened. You can walk outside and see that it did not.

The university disputes the audit. It says the spending was allowable and appropriate, and after the report came out it revised its grant reporting to pull back the costs the auditors had flagged. That belongs in the record, and it is the strongest answer the university has. Weigh it fairly. Then notice what it did. It changed the paperwork after the fact. It did not explain why eight people were paid to work on a project they say they never worked on.

Here is how a signed report ends up meaning nothing. A certification is a stand-in. It does the watching for the state that you do for free when the money is yours and you are standing right there. The state could not stand there, so it asked for a signature instead and trusted the signature to be true. And no one who signed was spending his own money on his own house. The work was for children none of them would ever meet, paid with money that started in somebody else’s paycheck. When no one in the room has a reason to check, the check becomes a formality, and a formality will sign whatever is put in front of it.

Maybe some of the eight signed without reading. Maybe some signed knowing better. The audit does not say, and for the point that matters here it does not have to. Whether any one of them was dishonest is a question for the people whose job is to judge people, and if a signature was knowingly false, that is theirs to pursue. The question this office asks comes first and is colder: how did the money move at all on signatures nobody checked? That is the oldest thing that happens to money nobody owns. The signature does the watching, and nobody watches the signature.

Setting intent aside is not setting the wrong aside. Money taken from people who got no say, meant to put a computer in front of a child who had none, was paid out as salary for work never done on it. Call it a filing error if you want. It was a wrong, whoever signed it and whatever they meant.

This is the part people miss about how money goes missing. It rarely walks out in a bag. It leaves behind a clean stack of forms, all signed, all filed, every box checked. The forms are what let everyone downstream assume the work was real. A certification that certifies nothing is worse than none at all, because it buys false confidence. It tells the next person in line to stop checking. The auditors found the gap where they happened to look.

This is the second story in a series about money the state loses track of, and it rhymes with the first. The labs that never opened were money that bought nothing. The eight who never worked are paperwork that proved nothing. Both were approved, recorded, and signed. The signature was the safeguard. The safeguard is the thing that failed.

And that is the difference between this money and yours. You do not need a signed slip to know whether the handyman showed up. You can see the gutters. When you pay for work, you know by the weekend whether you got it, because it is your money and your house and you were standing right there. The state paid eight people for the better part of a year and could not tell you what they did, because it was not standing there, and the money was never its own to begin with. You would have known by Friday.

A system is only as honest as the checks inside it, and a check that nobody checks guards nothing. It does not protect the money. It only tells the next person down the line that someone already looked.

Next week: The Hat Switch

Source: South Carolina Legislative Audit Council, A Review of the Office of Economic Engagement of the University of South Carolina and its Affiliation with the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and the South Carolina Research Foundation (December 2024). Read it: https://lac.sc.gov/node/271

In 2021, the state had federal money to spend and a good reason to spend it. The pandemic had sent more than $48 million in education relief into South Carolina. In March of that year, the Governor’s Office handed the University of South Carolina $6 million of it to build Apple computer labs around the state, in the places where the internet runs thin and a child’s homework depends on a signal that is often not there.

Some of those labs opened. There are iCarolina labs today on university campuses, in local libraries, and at Benedict College. That part worked, and it mattered.

Two of the labs never opened at all. The state spent $635,600 getting them ready.

Here is where that money went. The university paid $190,200 to lease space in the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator, a downtown building, and another $409,400 on a services agreement with the Incubator to hire staff, market the lab, and fit out the rooms. The lab never opened. The City of Columbia later cancelled the lease on the building.

The second lab was smaller. The university signed a three-year, $36,000 lease with the South Carolina Research Authority for a room at the McNair Center to hold an Apple lab. After the university stopped running online classes in that room, the lab sat unused.

Add it up and you get the same $635,600. Two leases, a staffing contract, and not one open lab.

Put it in terms you live with. You hire a contractor to put a new roof on your house. You pay him up front. The shingles get delivered and stacked in your driveway. Then the roof never goes on. The contractor got paid. The supply yard got paid. You are still standing in the kitchen with a bucket every time it rains. That is the $635,600. Everyone in the chain got their money, and the thing the money was for never showed up.

None of this is hidden. It comes from a public audit. The Legislative Audit Council, the legislature’s own auditors, reviewed this grant at the request of a bipartisan group of senators and found $1.7 million in questionable transactions inside it. The empty labs are the first $635,600 of that.

The university disputes the findings. Its president has said the spending was necessary, reasonable, and appropriate, that the office made its best efforts, and that some of the money went to outside organizations not under the university’s legal authority. He is entitled to that, and it deserves a fair hearing. But best efforts describe the trying. What this grant was meant to buy was open labs for children without the internet, and these two never opened. And if part of what went wrong is that the money flowed out to organizations the university could not fully control, that points straight at the problem rather than away from it.

So how does $635,600 walk out the door with nothing to show for it, when no one set out to waste a dime? I doubt a single person at USC did. The answer is older than this grant, and Milton Friedman put it best. There are four ways to spend money. When people spend their own money on themselves, they watch the price and they watch what they get. When they spend their own money on someone else, they still watch the price, but they care less about the result. When they spend someone else's money on themselves, they stop watching the price but still mind what they get. And when they spend someone else's money on someone else, they watch neither, because they have no reason to.

That is the box this money sat in from the start. It was not the university’s money. It came from Washington, though it started in your paycheck and mine. It was spent by one set of hands, routed through a nonprofit, on labs for children none of those hands would ever sit a child down in front of. Nobody in that chain was spending his own money on his own house.

So nobody stood at the end and asked the one question that decides everything. Did a lab open. Of course the shingles ended up in the driveway. That is what the fourth box does, every time, in every government, to anyone who stands in it. Not a character flaw. A structure.

And that is the whole difference between that money and yours. When it was yours, it sat in the first box. You watched the price and you watched what you got, because you earned it and there was never a dollar to spare. The morning a roofer left your shingles in the driveway and drove off, you would have been on the phone before lunch. You counted every dollar of that money when it was yours. The minute it left your hands, nobody counted it again.

That is the job I am running for, and it is why I am going to write this every week. Every story will come from a public document you can pull up and read yourself, the way I pulled this audit. No anonymous sources, no rumors, no guessing at what anyone meant. The record, in plain words, with the math shown.

Because the labs that never opened are one small piece of something bigger. Money in South Carolina has a way of vanishing the moment it leaves the state’s own books and moves somewhere harder to watch. At a university. At a charter school office. At an agency you have never heard of. And in the end, in the state budget itself. Different places, same disease.

The cure is the same every time. Somebody has to keep the count, stand at the end, and say what your money bought.

Next week: The Eight Who Never Worked.

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Source: South Carolina Legislative Audit Council, A Review of the Office of Economic Engagement of the University of South Carolina and its Affiliation with the USC/Columbia Technology Incubator and the South Carolina Research Foundation (December 2024). Read it: https://lac.sc.gov/node/271

My name is Mike Burkhold. I started a company in Charleston in 2009, and I have spent fifteen years making complicated financial information simple enough for people to act on. I am running for Comptroller General, the office that keeps the state’s books. I went looking at how the state handles your money, found enough that I could not stop looking, and decided to show the rest of you what I was seeing.

Here is the one idea under everything I write. South Carolina has built a system where almost no one pays a price for losing track of the public’s money. So the money gets lost. Sometimes it slips out the door through a private nonprofit. Sometimes it piles up in an account no one counts. Different places, same disease, and the cure is the same every time. Fix the system.

There is a reason the losing goes unnoticed for so long. The state's money is written down in language almost no one can follow, not an ordinary person, and in my experience not most of the legislators who vote on it. What no one understands, no one can fix. You cannot find the waste you cannot see, or judge a program whose numbers nobody can read. So before anyone argues about spending more or less, the money has to be made plain enough to look at. Make it plain, and what stayed hidden becomes something people can fix.

So here is what you can expect, and what you will never get.

Every piece starts with a public document you can read yourself. A real audit, a real budget, a real contract. I show you where it is so you can check my work. I do not use anonymous sources or rumors. If I cannot point you to the record, I do not write it.

I am hard on the system and easy on the people. The folks in these stories mostly did what the rules in front of them rewarded. That is not the same as saying no one ever does wrong. People do, and when someone breaks the law, we already have offices built to answer it. Prosecuting wrongdoing is the Attorney General’s job and the courts’, not the Comptroller’s. Mine is the books, the system that is supposed to track the money long before anything reaches a courtroom. So when I point at a broken rule instead of a person, it is not because I am soft on bad behavior. It is because that rule is the part this office is built to fix.

There is a second lane I stay out of. I do not decide what the state spends its money on. The legislature does that, and the people elect them to do it. I am not here to second-guess whether a dollar goes to a road or a classroom. Plenty of people will argue that out, and they should. My question is narrower, and it never changes. Once the legislature decides, is the money tracked, and can the people who spent it account for it? I keep the count. I do not pick the winners. That makes me an ally to anyone who wants the books to add up, the legislators and the Governor included, not a threat to anyone doing the work in good faith.

I write plainly. If a thing can be said over a fence, I will not say it from a podium. Money stops being complicated the minute someone is willing to explain it to you honestly, and that is the whole job here.

That is also where the name comes from. The work of this office, stripped down, is counting. Counting what came in, counting what went out, and being able to say with a straight face that the two add up. For too long nobody did that counting and stood behind it. I intend to.

The office is also the last hand the money passes through on its way out. When an agency goes to pay a bill, the money does not move until the Comptroller General signs the warrant for it. The job before signing is to make sure the payment is documented and going where the legislature sent it. That is counting with the power to stop a dollar that cannot account for itself.

I do this because I believe it matters and because I believe it can be fixed. South Carolina is a great state that continually underperforms. It has the potential to be the best run and the freest in the country. We do not get there by shouting that things are broken. We get there by identifying problems and then solving them.

Here is the part that is yours. Nobody asked you whether to send this money. It came out of your check before you ever saw it. The least anyone owed you was to know where it went, and for a long stretch no one could tell you. That is what I write about.

So read one piece. If it leaves you a little surer about where your money went, subscribe. It is free, and I will keep showing you, every week, for as long as it takes.

The Proof Isn’t There Yet

Earlier this month, the SC Daily Gazette reported that South Carolina’s State Treasurer has refused to sign off on long-term construction loans for our state’s universities. He wants proof the books are fixed before he puts his name on anything.

He is right to ask. So am I. So are you.

South Carolina hired an outside firm to track the cleanup of its financial records. That firm, Forvis Mazars, released its findings on March 9th of this year. Here is what they found: the most important piece of the cleanup, confirming that the state’s records actually match what the banks show, is still not finished. A dozen other fixes are written down on paper but have never been tested under real conditions. Those tests can’t happen until the next annual financial report is produced. That report may land on the next Comptroller General’s watch.

So when the Treasurer asks for proof, this is the answer the record gives him: the work isn’t done.

How did we get here? It starts with decisions made long before the errors became headlines.

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The Comptroller General who ran this office for years pushed his staff to publish the state’s annual financial report faster than any other state in the country. Not because faster meant more accurate. Because being first qualified for a national award, a certificate from the Government Finance Officers Association. His team would race to close the books in November. The forensic review later found that this pressure likely contributed to the errors. The award was real. The numbers behind it were not.

Since that Comptroller General stepped down in 2023, the office has had no elected leader. The annual financial report has taken eight months to produce in each of the past two years, two months past the national standard. The office’s own records say why: it had to wait for outside forensic help before it could publish. A clean set of books doesn’t require a forensic firm to close. This one did.

Proof isn’t a press release. It isn’t a list of policies written on paper. It is a signed record, line by line, showing what was fixed, who did the work, and who independently confirmed it was right. People’s names attached to specific claims. If something turns out to be wrong later, everyone can see exactly who said it was done and when. Nobody has signed their name to that record yet. South Carolina is being asked to take the office’s word for it. After everything that has happened, that is not enough.

One more thing voters deserve to hear plainly. When financial controls are weak for a decade, one forensic review rarely finds everything. The errors that made headlines, the $3.5 billion restatement, the $1.8 billion balance, were not theft. They were the product of a system that went unwatched for too long. A system like that doesn’t give up all its problems at once. There are likely more accounting errors and mistakes still waiting to be found. Anyone telling you the books are completely clean right now is getting ahead of what the evidence shows.

That matters for every taxpayer in this state.

When lenders can’t trust a state’s books, they charge more to lend. South Carolina’s credit rating, the score that determines what interest rate the state pays to borrow money for roads, schools, and public buildings, could come under pressure the longer this goes unresolved. Higher borrowing costs don’t appear on a bill with your name on it. They show up as roads that take longer to fix, school budgets that come up short, and projects that get pushed back another year. The money to cover higher interest has to come from the same place all state money comes from, the people who live and work here and pay their taxes in good faith.

The Comptroller General’s office exists for one reason: to make sure the public’s money is counted honestly and reported plainly. Not reported fast to win an award. Not reported late because the underlying numbers weren’t ready. Reported accurately, on time, by people who stand behind what they sign. When that office works the way it should, the Treasurer doesn’t have to demand proof. The proof is already there, in public, for anyone to read.

South Carolina has not had that in a long time.

What this state needs is a Comptroller General hired by voters who answers to voters when the job isn’t done. Someone who will open the books on day one, say plainly what they find, good news or bad, and post every open item in plain English where anyone can see it.

No award-chasing. No waiting for an outside firm to tell the office what it should already know. No keeping problems inside the building until they become headlines.

The Treasurer shouldn’t have to guess whether the books are right. Neither should you.

The books belong to the people. All of them. Always.

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What I Will Do First as South Carolina’s Comptroller General

I am the Republican nominee for Comptroller General of South Carolina. I have spent a career building organizations, solving hard operational problems, and creating accountability in environments where it had been absent. That background is why I got into this race - because the problems facing this office are not primarily accounting problems. They are organizational and structural ones, and they have gone unresolved long enough.

Here is what I intend to do about them.

Close the open audit recommendations.

Independent reviewers commissioned by the General Assembly identified specific reforms that remained incomplete or unproven at the time of their final report. Those findings do not expire. My first commitment is to produce a clear public accounting of exactly where each recommendation stands - which are genuinely complete, which are complete on paper but untested in practice, and which remain open. That report will go to the General Assembly and to the public. South Carolina has earned the right to know that number.

Require agencies to close their books every month.

State agencies are currently not required to reconcile and certify their financial data on a regular cycle. That gap makes errors harder to catch and easier to accumulate. The Comptroller General has the authority to change that. Establishing a mandatory monthly financial close - with defined standards and real consequences for agencies that do not comply - is one of the most direct structural reforms available. It does not require new legislation. It requires will. I intend to use it.

Build a public transparency dashboard.

Citizens should not need an accounting background to understand how South Carolina spends their money. A public dashboard showing agency spending, contract activity, and financial reporting status in plain language is achievable with current technology. Transparency of that kind changes behavior. When data is visible, the incentive to keep it accurate increases. That benefits agencies doing their jobs and creates pressure on those that are not. I intend to build it.

Rebuild the office’s capacity to do its job.

The Comptroller General’s office today operates with a fraction of the staff it had when it was functioning at full capacity. That is not a sustainable condition for an office responsible for the integrity of state financial reporting. One of my first acts will be an honest assessment of where the critical gaps are, followed by a plan to fill permanent roles where the need is ongoing and bring in contractors where the need is immediate.

None of this is complicated in concept. All of it requires sustained attention and willingness to hold the line when agencies push back. The General Assembly did the hard work of demanding accountability after the restatement and commissioning the reviews that identified what needed to change. That work deserves a finish.

I intend to deliver it.

I was reading FITSNews one evening about a year ago, not long after writing a check to the state, not a small one, when I saw a headline about South Carolina losing $3.5 billion in a financial restatement. I assumed it was a typo. I went back and read it again. It wasn’t.

That was stunning enough. Then I found out it wasn’t even the whole story. Investigators had also uncovered questions surrounding a separate $1.8 billion tied to conversion and accounting entries during the state’s transition from its legacy STARS accounting system to the current SCEIS platform. Two massive accounting failures. Billions of dollars. And most South Carolinians had no idea either had happened.

I spent the next month trying to understand what was going on. What I found, or rather what I couldn’t find, changed everything. There are bits and pieces of financial information scattered across state government, but nothing comprehensive, nothing current, and no meaningful public tracking of whether the spending is producing results. I couldn’t find a clear picture of where the money goes. I’m not sure anyone can.

That is why I am running for Comptroller General.

Lawmakers in Columbia want to eliminate the income tax. I support that goal. Families should keep more of what they earn, and a disciplined government should always aim to reduce the burden on its citizens. Every dollar taken from families and businesses is a dollar that isn’t being invested, hired, or grown. And unlike the corporate incentive giveaways that have become our substitute for a competitive tax code, broad tax relief doesn’t pick winners. It lets everyone compete on a level playing field. If we want to recruit businesses the way Tennessee, Florida, and Texas do, we need a tax code that competes, not a system of handouts that rewards whoever hires the best lobbyist.

But before South Carolina eliminates the income tax, lawmakers and taxpayers deserve a clear answer to a basic question.

Where is all the money going?

South Carolina manages more than $40 billion a year in taxpayer funds. I have spoken with legislators and business leaders across the state, and the consensus is striking. The big errors are almost certainly not the only errors. When billions of dollars can remain misclassified or misunderstood inside the state’s financial reporting process for years, it is a strong indication of poor management and an understaffed office operating without adequate oversight. Large accounting failures rarely occur in isolation. They reveal deeper weaknesses in internal controls, reconciliation processes, and financial discipline.

Those numbers caught headlines for obvious reasons. But those errors are not the fire. They are the smoke.

In business, no responsible CEO would make major strategic decisions without clean financial statements. No board of directors would approve major capital moves if the books were unclear. State government should meet the same standard. South Carolina manages tens of billions of taxpayer dollars each year. Before lawmakers decide which taxes to eliminate, they deserve a complete and reliable picture of how that money moves through the system.

Right now the House and Senate are in the middle of budget season, making decisions that affect every taxpayer in this state. They are debating spending priorities, evaluating tax reform proposals, and weighing choices that will shape South Carolina’s future. Legislators take this work seriously. But even the most diligent lawmaker can only make decisions based on the information available. When the numbers are unclear, every decision becomes guesswork.

A budget is nothing more than a list of priorities with dollar signs attached. Legislators cannot set those priorities responsibly unless they can clearly see where the money is going. Right now that level of clarity does not exist.

The good news is that this problem has a solution. Fix the financial systems. That work begins with three straightforward reforms.

Reconcile the Books and Implement a Monthly Financial Close

The priority must be a full reconciliation of the state’s financial records. Treasury balances, agency accounting systems, and the enterprise accounting platform must align so every dollar moving through state government can be tracked and verified.

Private companies close their books every month. South Carolina should operate with the same discipline. Today the state primarily compiles its financial picture once a year through the Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. That approach leaves lawmakers and agency leaders working with outdated information. A state managing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars should close its books monthly, providing a current and reliable view of revenues, expenditures, and cash balances.

Regular reconciliations and monthly financial closes create accountability. They force agencies to maintain clean records, allow leaders to identify problems early, and prevent small accounting errors from becoming billion-dollar surprises.

Build a Taxpayer Transparency Dashboard

Citizens deserve to see how their money is spent. South Carolina should operate a public financial transparency system where taxpayers can view state expenditures in real time. Vendors, contracts, agency spending, and program costs should be easily searchable by anyone with an internet connection.

Several states already operate systems like this. Transparency changes behavior. When spending becomes visible, waste becomes harder to hide and leaders become more careful with every dollar.

Give Lawmakers the Data to Make Real Budget Decisions

Once the financial systems become reliable and transparent, the legislature can finally answer the question that matters most: where should we cut?

Tax reform cannot happen in a vacuum. Eliminating the income tax will require thoughtful decisions about spending priorities and efficiencies. Lawmakers cannot make those decisions responsibly without accurate data. Clean books create clarity, and clarity is what allows policymakers to make bold reforms.

None of this is complicated. Every well-run organization in the private sector already operates this way. South Carolina should expect the same from its government.

I went looking for the numbers to make the case for tax reform, and they weren’t there. That is the problem I am running to fix.

My priority as Comptroller General will be straightforward: fix the books. Reconcile the accounts, build transparency into the system, and give lawmakers and citizens a clear picture of where every dollar goes.

South Carolina can eliminate the income tax. We should. But first we need to know where the money is, and right now, we don’t.

Today I am pleased to announce that Charleston businessmen Ben Navarro and Austin McCombs have joined our Executive Leadership Council.

Their decision to serve strengthens this effort in meaningful ways. Both have built complex organizations, managed significant capital, and operated in environments where financial discipline, transparency, and performance are foundational. Their experience reflects the seriousness of what we are undertaking.

They join a Council intentionally assembled to support a clear objective: establishing a CFO standard for the South Carolina Comptroller General’s office.

South Carolina manages more than $40 billion annually in revenue and expenditures. That scale requires more than statutory compliance. It requires timely reporting, rigorous internal controls, modern financial systems, disciplined reconciliations, liquidity awareness, and clear communication to stakeholders. In any enterprise of comparable size, those responsibilities would fall to a chief financial officer operating with executive authority and accountability.

That is the model we intend to apply.

The members of this Council reflect that standard of leadership.

Dan Adams is the founder of The Capital Corporation and has directed more than 200 merger and acquisition transactions across multiple industries. His career in investment banking and private equity has required rigorous financial analysis, disciplined valuation, and governance structures where clarity and accountability are essential. His experience strengthens the Council’s focus on capital discipline and operational oversight.

Philip Garland served as Global Chief Information Officer at Willis Towers Watson and as U.S. CIO and Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. A CPA with more than four decades of leadership in enterprise transformation, cybersecurity governance, and finance-technology integration, he brings rare expertise at the intersection of accounting rigor and large-scale systems modernization. His background is directly relevant to strengthening South Carolina’s financial infrastructure.

Mikee Johnson is a respected South Carolina manufacturing leader and former chair of the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance and the State Workforce Investment Board. His experience in workforce alignment, operational leadership, and long-term business stewardship reflects the discipline required to balance growth with fiscal responsibility. He brings a strong grounding in the realities of payroll, production, and economic development across our state.

Austin McCombs is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gnosis Freight, a Charleston-based logistics technology company pioneering Container Lifecycle Management®. Since founding the company in 2017, he has led its rapid growth, including institutional investment from Vista Equity Partners. His expertise in data architecture, operational transparency, and scalable systems aligns directly with modernizing how South Carolina tracks and communicates financial performance.

Ben Navarro is the founder of Beemok, a private investment firm dedicated to disciplined, long-term capital allocation and the building of enduring institutions. Over the course of his career in financial services and investment leadership, he has overseen enterprises operating at national scale, grounded in governance, operational rigor, and sustained performance. His work reflects a philosophy of stewardship — that capital, when deployed thoughtfully, should create lasting value and strengthen the communities it serves across South Carolina.

John Regan is a Founding Partner and Chief Investment Officer of PermCap, managing more than $5 billion in assets for endowments and families. As a former Senior Investment Officer at Cornell University’s endowment, he helped guide restructuring following the 2008 financial crisis. His institutional asset management background reinforces the Council’s emphasis on liquidity planning, fiduciary discipline, and long-term financial stewardship.

Chad Waldorf is an entrepreneur and former Deputy Chief of Staff to Governor Mark Sanford, where he helped write South Carolina’s first working Executive Budget. As chair of the GEAR Commission, he identified more than $500 million in savings and supported structural administrative reform. He brings practical experience bridging private-sector discipline and public-sector execution.

Bud Watts is Chairman of CommScope and former founder and leader of Carlyle’s Technology Buyout Group. With decades of experience in public company governance and private equity investing, he brings disciplined capital allocation judgment and board-level oversight developed in highly scrutinized financial environments. His leadership reflects both operational rigor and long-term strategic perspective.

Collectively, this Council represents experience and excellence in capital markets, enterprise governance, digital transformation, executive budgeting, and operational restructuring and entrepreneurial spirit. These are leaders accustomed to environments where numbers must reconcile, financial statements must withstand scrutiny, and stakeholders expect transparency.

That mindset is essential.

Establishing a CFO Standard in Government

A modern CFO does more than compile financial statements. The role includes safeguarding assets, enforcing internal controls, managing liquidity, overseeing procurement compliance, communicating financial performance, and providing leadership with accurate and timely data for decision-making.

Applying that model to the Comptroller General’s office benefits both taxpayers and the legislature.

Taxpayers deserve accurate, timely, and understandable information about how revenue is collected and how expenditures are managed. Strong monthly closes, prompt reconciliations, and modern reporting dashboards create clarity. Clarity builds confidence.

Legislators deserve reliable data when crafting budgets and evaluating policy proposals. Timely revenue tracking improves forecasting. Transparent expenditure monitoring identifies variances early. Clear liquidity reporting supports prudent fiscal planning. When financial information is dependable, decisions improve.

Beyond tracking dollars, we must measure performance. Public appropriations should be paired with measurable outputs. Understanding what results are achieved for each dollar spent strengthens accountability and informs future allocation decisions.

Routine, structured, and candid discussion of financial performance benefits everyone. Transparency should not be reactive. It should be institutionalized.

The Responsibility of an Elected Comptroller General

The Comptroller General is elected by the people of South Carolina. That carries both authority and responsibility.

The office should serve as the primary communicator of the state’s financial performance to its citizens. Financial reporting should not be designed solely for auditors or internal processes. It should be presented in a manner that is accurate, accessible, and useful to anyone seeking to understand the stewardship of public funds.

Clarity does not mean simplification at the expense of substance. It means presenting reliable information in formats that allow engagement at multiple levels. Some citizens will seek high-level summaries. Others will examine detailed line-item data. Both should be available.

The office must also ensure that all expenditures comply with established procurement requirements and internal controls. Vigilance in monitoring purchases protects taxpayers and reinforces trust. Waste, fraud, and abuse should be identified quickly and addressed directly, with transparency about both the issue and the remedy.

An elected Comptroller General should speak candidly about financial trends, risks, and performance. That communication should be steady, factual, and constructive. When citizens have reliable information presented openly, confidence strengthens and public debate improves.

South Carolina is financially strong. But strength must be reinforced by disciplined systems, modern reporting, and executive-level oversight that matches the scale of our state’s growth.

This Leadership Council reflects a commitment to that standard.

You can learn more about our Executive Leadership Council here:
https://www.burkhold.net/leadershipcouncil

If South Carolina is to become the most transparent and best-run state in the country, the place where the money flows must be governed with precision, discipline, and truth in numbers.

We need the support of South Carolina voters to make this happen.

—
Mike Burkhold

South Carolina stands at a moment of real opportunity.

Our state is growing. Families and businesses continue to choose South Carolina because they see promise and stability. But opportunity only lasts if the fundamentals are sound. Nothing is more fundamental than how a state manages its money.

In 2023, South Carolinians learned that the state could not account for $3.5 billion in its financial records. Months later, another $1.8 billion discrepancy came to light. What followed was confusion, delayed explanations, and finger-pointing across agencies. These episodes did not just expose accounting errors. They revealed a deeper failure of ownership and accountability.

For too long, the Comptroller General has been treated as a passive accounting function rather than a financial leadership role. Recording transactions and closing the books while assuming problems will be caught later is an outdated model. It does not work in a state managing roughly $40 billion a year.

South Carolina needs a Comptroller General who functions more like a chief financial officer.

A CFO does not wait for annual reports to discover problems. A CFO demands clarity, asks hard questions, and intervenes early when numbers do not align. Most importantly, a CFO owns the outcome.

South Carolina’s challenge extends beyond one office. Our executive branch is highly fragmented, with authority spread across independently elected offices and agencies that often operate in parallel rather than in coordination. This structure creates inefficiency, slows decision-making, and blurs accountability.

When authority is diffuse, responsibility becomes optional. Each office controls a piece of the system, but no one owns the whole. When failures occur, the response becomes explanation and redirection instead of correction.

That dynamic was on full display in 2023. Systems were blamed. Processes were questioned. Audits arrived after the fact. What was missing was clear ownership.

Fraud and financial mismanagement thrive where oversight is distant and accountability is blurred. When citizens cannot clearly see where money goes, or when explanations arrive years later, confidence collapses. Once trust erodes, every public function suffers.

Transparency should not be just a slogan; it is the foundation of public trust.

South Carolina does not yet have the level of transparency that earns trust. Today, too much financial information is delayed, fragmented, or difficult for lawmakers and citizens to understand. That gap creates risk and invites error. More importantly, it allows unelected bureaucracies to control the financial narrative instead of the people’s elected representatives. When legislators lack timely, clear data, meaningful oversight becomes impossible.

Modern financial systems can provide real-time visibility into spending. Every dollar can be traceable. Every contract can be tied to purpose and performance. Irregularities can be flagged early, before they become crises. But those tools only matter if the state chooses to implement them and lead around them.

Technology alone, however, will not fix a cultural problem.

South Carolina needs clear standards of stewardship, clear lines of responsibility, and leaders willing to accept accountability rather than deflect it. The Comptroller General’s office should function as an active financial steward, delivering timely, intelligible information that lawmakers, reporters and citizens can use on a daily basis.

Getting this right is not about politics. It is about fundamentals.

A state cannot promise efficiency if it cannot track its dollars. It cannot promise restraint if it cannot control spending. And it cannot promise accountability if no one is clearly accountable.

South Carolina’s future is full of promise. Realizing that promise starts by managing our money professionally, transparently, and responsibly, and by ensuring someone owns the outcome.

Mike Burkhold is a Charleston businessman and the founder of Equiscript, a healthcare technology company serving hospitals and health centers nationwide. He is running for South Carolina Comptroller General to bring transparency and accountability to the state’s finances. Married to his wife Melanie for 30 years, he has two children, lives on Sullivan’s Island and attends St. Andrews Church in Mt. Pleasant.

We have reached a point where most taxpayers view politicians and non-taxpayers as total grifters.

That belief did not appear overnight. It was earned through years of waste, opacity, and a governing culture that tolerates failure without consequence. And it is dangerous. Once trust collapses, self-government soon follows.

Recent reporting out of Minnesota exposed widespread fraud in taxpayer-funded daycare programs. Millions of dollars flowed to shell entities. Addresses overlapped. Payments repeated. Obvious red flags went ignored. The money vanished, and taxpayers paid the price.

This was not an isolated failure. It was a predictable outcome.

The fraud mattered because it was foreseeable. The patterns were obvious. Any competent financial system should have flagged them immediately. Either public employees ignored clear warnings, or no one bothered to look.

Both explanations point to the same problem.

And Minnesota is not alone.

We have seen billions stolen through pandemic relief fraud. We have seen abuse of public credit cards, rigged contracting, and nonprofits created solely to siphon taxpayer dollars. In South Carolina, the state lost track of $3.5 billion. Later, another $1.8 billion discrepancy surfaced. These are not accounting quirks. They are systemic breakdowns at the core of government finance.

Each scandal generates headlines. Then the system moves on.

Taxpayers do not.

Every failure reinforces the same conclusion: no one is watching the money, and no one is held responsible when it disappears.

That belief corrodes a free society.

Most taxpayers do not object to paying taxes that genuinely help people in need. They understand that a strong society protects the vulnerable. What they object to is being asked to fund systems that leak, enable fraud, and refuse to police themselves.

That is the real risk we face.

When trust in the safety net collapses, the entire system becomes undermined. People stop believing aid reaches those who need it. Support erodes. Legitimate programs lose public backing. The people who suffer most are not taxpayers, but the very individuals those programs were designed to help.

A system that tolerates fraud does not protect the vulnerable. It betrays them.

Self-government depends on earned trust. When citizens believe the rules apply evenly and public money is handled honestly, they comply willingly. They pay taxes. They follow the law. They accept outcomes they may not like.

When that belief breaks, everything changes.

Taxes feel like extraction. Laws feel arbitrary. Elections feel suspect. Civic engagement gives way to anger or apathy. Government increasingly relies on enforcement and bureaucracy because consent is gone.

That is how self-government erodes without a single vote being cast.

This cannot be fixed with better messaging or new slogans. It requires radical change across every level of government.

Transparency must be unavoidable. Every dollar traceable. Every payment tied to a contract. Every contract visible. Fraud must be detected before money leaves the door, not after journalists uncover it.

Accountability must also be real. There is a clear legal line between negligence and criminal facilitation. Honest mistakes should be corrected. Gross negligence should carry professional consequences. But when public employees knowingly ignore red flags, approve improper payments, or enable fraud through willful inaction, that is not incompetence. That is facilitation. And it should carry criminal penalties.

Bureaucrats do not get immunity because fraud occurred on their watch instead of at their direction. Stewardship of public money is a legal and moral duty.

Public trust has a tipping point. Once enough taxpayers conclude the system is irredeemably rigged, compliance gives way to resentment and consent gives way to coercion. Every unpunished scandal pushes us closer to that line. All evidence suggests we are already there.

If defenders of the status quo believe this system is acceptable, they should say so plainly and explain why taxpayers deserve less accountability than shareholders do.

That is why the Comptroller General’s office matters. It cannot function as a passive bookkeeper or a shield for bureaucratic failure. It must act as an independent financial watchdog with the authority to expose fraud, identify who allowed it, and impose consequences.

As SC Comptroller General, I will demand radical transparency, modern fraud detection, and clear responsibility. When taxpayer dollars disappear, the public will be told what happened, who failed, and what will change.

Enforce accountability now or accept the collapse of public trust.

A republic cannot function when citizens believe the people in charge are looting it.

Once that belief hardens, it does not come back.

Moving past the politics and finally fixing South Carolina

I know you’re frustrated. I am too. South Carolina is full of hardworking families who do things right, play by the rules, and still feel like the system is rigged against them. It doesn’t have to be this way. We can do better. Not with more empty slogans or complacent politicians who are comfortable with the way things are, but with real leadership, discipline, and vision. If we’re willing to expect more from our government and ourselves, we can build something better. That starts by being honest about where we are and bold about where we can go.

Here’s the truth - South Carolina is broken. We are one of the highest-taxed red states in America, yet we rank near the bottom in education, infrastructure, and income. Agencies operate without oversight. Judges are picked by a handful of legislators behind closed doors. Bureaucrats answer to no one. Lawsuit abuse drives up costs for every family and business, and our own financial systems are so broken we lost track of $3.5 billion. Meanwhile, too many politicians look the other way, more focused on protecting the status quo than fixing it. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Imagine a South Carolina where families keep more of what they earn, where schools are strong and steady, and where young people can afford their first home without leaving the communities that raised them. Students graduate into an economy with real opportunity and a clear path to build their lives here. Top companies from around the country choose to relocate not because we hand out incentives but because executives know South Carolina is the most business friendly state in the Union and they want to raise their families here. Local businesses thrive because government does not stand in their way. Roads get built. Agencies do their work without drama or hidden agendas. The state runs with discipline and transparency, and citizens trust the institutions that serve them. It feels like the South Carolina our forebears imagined when they risked everything for freedom 250 years ago.

South Carolina stands at a unique point in time. Our population is growing faster than almost any state in the country. Prosperity is rising. New families and new businesses are choosing this place because they see stability and promise. And we are reaching this moment just as the world enters an age of rapid technological advancement and emerging artificial intelligence. Few states are prepared for this shift. We can be. This combination of growth and innovation can create a golden era for South Carolina if we choose leadership, discipline, and a clear vision.

This future is not out of reach. It is achievable. It belongs to us if we choose it. South Carolina has the people, the strength, and the momentum to shape its own course. We are not waiting on Washington. We are not dependent on shifting national trends. We can build a government that reflects our priorities and protects our freedom. If we demand clarity, discipline, and accountability, we can create the strongest model of self-governance in the country.

To reach this vision, we must follow a clear path. Each step builds on the others. Together they create a state that is free, well run, and stable.

South Carolina’s Path Forward: An Eight Point Plan

1. Financial Transparency. The first step is financial transparency. Nothing in government improves until the truth about how money is spent comes into full view. We cannot fix problems we cannot see. When every financial transaction is visible, citizens gain power, agency leaders gain discipline, and the old habit of hiding waste or failure comes to an end. Transparency lets us measure outcomes. Outcomes let us measure efficiency. This is the foundation of everything that comes next.

2. Government Efficiency and Modernization. A clear financial picture gives us the ability to improve efficiency. With honest numbers, we can modernize technology, realign agencies, and build systems that serve citizens instead of bureaucracies. When leaders know their work is measured and visible, performance rises. Accountability becomes real. This is how a government becomes lean, responsive, and trustworthy.

3. Primary and Secondary Education Reform. Education shapes the future of our state. Our primary and secondary schools should be on a path to become top ten in the country, anchored in strong leadership and real accountability. School choice is essential. Families deserve the freedom to select the school that best fits their children, whether public, charter, private, or home based. Choice strengthens students and strengthens communities.

4. Higher Education Reform. Our colleges and universities should be the most efficient and least expensive in the nation. They should reflect the conservative values of the taxpayers who fund them and the South Carolina families who entrust their children to them. They must prepare students for productive lives, not ideology or debt. South Carolina should be the first state to break the back of crushing student loans by driving down costs and demanding real accountability. When higher education respects families and students, the entire state grows stronger.

5. Housing Affordability and Family Stability. Young families are the lifeblood of a healthy society. In South Carolina, young adults should be able to buy a home, build equity, and step into the freedoms and responsibilities of adulthood. Homeownership is the engine of real wealth. When young people cannot afford to stay, the state loses more than talent. It loses its future.

6. Tax Competitiveness and Economic Freedom. Low taxes are a hallmark of a disciplined state. South Carolina should compete to have the lowest tax burden in America. That does not happen through slogans. It happens through responsible budgeting, controlled spending, and financial and operational management that protects every dollar a citizen earns. States that trust their people with their own money grow faster and stronger.

7. A Pro-Business Climate Without Special Favors. Top companies should want to move to South Carolina not because we hand out taxpayer funded incentives, but because South Carolina is the most business friendly state in the Union and because executives want to raise their families here. A clean, predictable environment where rules are fair and government is stable attracts good companies and good jobs. Prosperity should be shared with the people who have lived here for generations and built the culture we treasure.

8. A Fair and Independent Judicial System. South Carolina cannot become the best run state in the country without a legal system that is clear, predictable, and independent. Families and businesses must know that judges apply the law evenly and that decisions rest on facts, not political influence. Today too much power over judicial appointments rests with a small group of legislators, blurring the separation of powers and creating the appearance of favoritism. A fair legal system protects rights, strengthens confidence, and gives businesses the stability they need to invest, hire, and grow. If South Carolina wants the strongest business climate in the nation, we need courts that every citizen and every company can trust.

South Carolina can achieve this. We can build a state that becomes the national model for pro-business, conservative families who want stability and opportunity. We can do it while ensuring that the prosperity of tomorrow is shared by the people who have lived here for generations. South Carolina can grow without losing its character.

Our future is bright because we control our destiny. While other states drift toward centralized control and economic stagnation, we can choose a different path. We can choose freedom, order, and transparency. We can be the state that proves a disciplined government and a confident people can outperform the chaos playing out across the country.

This vision is not abstract. It is a governing framework. If I were running for governor, this is the standard I would hold myself to. Every policy, every reform, every decision would be measured against whether it advances this vision of a freer, stronger, more accountable South Carolina.

That is why repairing the Comptroller General’s office matters so much. It is the first structural reform required to achieve this future. A state cannot promise efficiency when its financial systems are broken. It cannot promise low taxes when it cannot track its own dollars. It cannot promise accountability when no one can trust the books.

Fixing the Comptroller General’s office is the foundation. It is where discipline begins. It is where transparency becomes real. It is where South Carolina proves that it intends to govern itself with competence and integrity.

A free state.A well run state.A state rising to its promise.

This is the South Carolina we can build. And it starts by fixing the place where the money flows.