Announced
The state can tell you what was promised to the second decimal. What came back, it says it cannot credibly measure.
Every January, South Carolina posts its scoreboard for the year in economic development, and the numbers arrive with decimal precision. The latest: $9.12 billion in capital investment, 82 projects, more than 8,100 new jobs, the third-highest year on record. Read the state’s own sentences, though, and one word rides in front of nearly every figure. “Announced.” Announced total capital investment. Announced new jobs. Announced projects. The word is in the state’s press releases.
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.
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.
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:
One Sentence in the Code
South Carolina rewards companies for promising new jobs with a tax credit, and the state’s own auditors are forbidden by law from knowing which companies take it. Nobody has to dodge the auditors or slow-walk a records request. One sentence in the state code does the whole job.
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).