South Carolina senators grill treasurer over $1.8 billion mystery but get few answers

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A group of South Carolina senators didn’t get much clarity Tuesday as they sought answers about how $1.8 billion ended up passing through a state bank account over the past decade without anyone knowing where it came from or was supposed to go.

The two typically elected officials responsible for the state’s accounting and bank accounts — the comptroller general and treasurer — appeared before a Senate subcommittee.

The agenda said they were giving their budget requests. But almost the whole four-hour meeting was consumed by the missing $1.8 billion and other accounting errors that happened as the state shifted accounting systems in the mid-2010s.

Accountants are still trying to untangle the mess, but it appears that every time the state’s books were out of whack, money was shifted from somewhere into an account that helped balance it out, state Senate leaders have said. In a different problem, the state was double-counting higher education money to the tune of almost $4 billion.

Comptroller General Brian Gaines, who took over for the elected Republican director after he resigned when the accounting errors started to emerge last year, spoke for about 10 minutes. He promised to continue to help senators in any way to unravel the mess and said the account in question where the $1.8 billion went was created by the treasurer’s office.

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