SC Gov. McMaster says ‘let the people decide’ after comptroller general’s $3.5B error
Gov. Henry McMaster said Thursday that South Carolina lawmakers should resist the urge to impeach Richard Eckstrom after revelations the state’s chief accountant made a multibillion-dollar error of the state’s cash balances.
“Mr. Eckstrom has been elected and reelected,” McMaster said. “I don’t think we want to become Washington and do the impeachments like they do there for purely political reasons in my opinion. We don’t want to weaponize impeachment. It is allowed by law. I think the answer for all these questions are elections. Let the people decide.”
A bipartisan group of 16 House members that includes House Majority Leader Davey Hiott, R-Pickens, and is being led by Rep. Gil Gatch, R-Dorchester, last week filed a resolution to impeach the comptroller general for his failure to catch a yearslong $3.5 billion accounting error.
Separately, next week the Senate Finance Committee is expected to issue a report of recommendations after grilling Eckstrom for hours about the error.
Eckstrom, the state’s chief accountant and top fiscal watchdog, is in charge of running the state’s payroll, paying vendors, helping other agencies with the accounting system and assembling the state’s annual financial report.
He was first elected comptroller general in 2002, and was reelected in November to another four-year term.
Eckstrom’s misreporting of how much cash the state had in its bank accounts stretched over a decade.
State lawmakers said they first learned of the error in February, after Eckstrom originally said his office double counted money sent to colleges and universities. Now, other agency cash balances are in question, after lawmakers this month learned that Eckstrom also under reported the state Department of Transportation’s financial position by about $500 million and over reported other agencies of state government by $4 billion.
The net amount he was off by is about $3.5 billion, but in total $4.5 billion was misreported, lawmakers learned this week.
The state’s Treasurer’s Office and Department of Administration have both said the annual financial reports are the comptroller general’s responsibility, and auditors said they repeatedly warned Eckstrom of weaknesses in his office going back to 2012.
Eckstrom’s reporting error does not impact how much money the state has available. Lawmakers say the reporting error has no impact on the state budget and will not affect this year’s spending plan, set to be debated by the House starting Monday.
“I have confidence in everyone in the Legislature and everyone in these offices,” McMaster said. “They may breach that confidence by a crime or something of that nature that will be handled by that system. But the system that we have is called elections and they work.”
Eckstrom on Tuesday told a Senate Finance Committee panel investigating the reporting error that other state agencies also share responsibility in preparing annual comprehensive financial reports.
“I’m certainly the last agency to deal with that document, but a lot of agencies that provide information that I consolidate, that I combine into that document,” Eckstrom said.
As lawmakers scrutinize Eckstrom’s work, the Republican told senators he has hired Rob Godfrey and Columbia attorney Robert Bolchoz to assist with “communications.”
Godfrey was deputy chief of staff for communications in Nikki Haley’s administration and most recently was a senior advisor on McMaster’s reelection campaign. In January 2022, Bolchoz was named board chairman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control Board, but served less than a year and left the role in December.
“The comptroller is not able to answer basic questions,” state Sen. Larry Grooms, R-Berkeley, who is leading the Senate panel looking into Eckstrom, told reporters Tuesday. “He’s sometimes devoid of reality, and particularly when he’s unable to recall whether he has hired an attorney or not.”
