South Carolina mulls mystery $1.8bn in account: ‘We don’t know why it’s there’

To put it mildly, the South Carolina state government faces an unusual problem: what to do about $1.8bn found in a state bank account when no one knows how it got there, how it should be spent or even whether it really exists.

Discussing the problem, the Republican governor, Henry McMaster, made a play for political understatement of the year.

“There’s something wrong somewhere,” McMaster told reporters, adding: “We don’t know why it’s there, what it’s supposed to be used for, how long it’s been there – that’s a problem.”

Last year, the state comptroller resigned after the discovery of a 10-year, $3.5bn accounting error. State lawmakers say the $1.8bn sum could be related to that scandal, the New York Times reported. Or it may not be. No one knows.

Working out the truth is not proving easy, particularly because the new comptroller, Brian Gaines, a Democrat, is fighting with the state treasurer, Curtis Loftis Jr, a Republican, over where the $1.8bn came from and what to do about it.

State officials say the sum was discovered last October – though the state auditor, George Kennedy III, recently told a hearing he knew about it in 2017 but presumed it was in the account temporarily, the Times said.

This week, Larry Grooms, a state senator, told News19, a CBS affiliate in Columbia: “The governor appointed a new comptroller. The new comptroller trying to close the books alerted us to what appeared to be something wrong with one account within our state’s finances.

“Out of thousands of thousands of accounts, here’s one account with $1.8bn associated with it.

“Having $1.8bn in an account that’s supposed to be zero tells us that something is clearly wrong with our state’s accounting and the problems aren’t solved.

“The state treasurer’s