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:
We Can't Run an Excellent Government Without Reliable Financials
The Comptroller General holds one of five seats on the State Fiscal Accountability Authority, the board that selects the State Auditor. 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.
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.