SOUTH CAROLINA (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — There are growing calls for the resignation of South Carolina’s state treasurer following a new report on an investigation into a $1.8 billion accounting blunder.
“It’s just a terrible situation to be in. It shouldn’t be that way,” State Republican Senator Larry Grooms of Berkeley County said.
Grooms is one of the loudest voices calling for state treasurer Curtis Loftis to resign. This comes after a lengthy investigation into $1.8 billion found in a state account in March 2024.
“We stopped short of calling for the treasurer’s resignation because we needed to hire a forensic accounting team to get to the bottom of it,” Grooms said.
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An audit found the money never existed; it was the result of errors during a transition to a new accounting system, even though Loftis claimed it was real last year. The Senate finance subcommittee report released on Monday finds that Loftis “willfully neglected” his duties as treasurer.
“When you’re the treasurer and you don’t know whether $1.8 billion is real when you have hundreds of millions of dollars in error on the state treasury books and you hide it when confronted about it, you lie about it. There’s a problem with that treasurer, that elected officer,” Grooms said.
The 49-page report claims South Carolina’s financial future is not secure with Loftis, and leaving him as treasurer would cause irreparable harm.
“The subcommittee that I chair with been investigating the $1.8 billion anomaly now for the past 13, 14 months. And so we’ve collected thousands and thousands of pages of testimony that countless interviews, hours and hours of a dozen or more committee hearings. And so the work of the subcommittee, the 49 page report, is meticulously footnoted with 605 pages of documentation to go along with it,” Grooms said.
“Our state’s two elected officers that handled the money, the accountant and the banker, the two, they’re supposed to be a check on each other, but they weren’t. They actually had corruption going on within each other’s houses,” Groom said.
The previous comptroller general and state auditor resigned over recent financial errors, and lawmakers say Loftis should be next.
However, the treasurer doesn’t agree with that assessment, saying in a statement, “South Carolina’s financial threat isn’t from mismanagement or missing money… The real danger comes from a relentless, politically motivated attack on my office.”
Grooms says it’s now up to lawmakers to take the next constitutional step.
“The state constitution has mechanisms for removal of a constitutional officer. One is outright impeachment, and that’s really for high crimes and a misdemeanor. I think that’s what it says in there. But willful neglect of duty is another reason. It’s in the same article as impeachment, but it does forcibly remove a constitutional officer for willful neglect of duty. And that’s why he’s being charged with willful neglect of duty. And he’ll have an opportunity to defend himself. But it requires a two-thirds vote of the house and a two-thirds vote of the senate to vacate the office of state treasurer,” Grooms said.
Senator Grooms believes this scandal affects the trust people in South Carolina have in elected officials to keep their money safe, and it could have a big impact on the state’s ability to borrow money — due to a lack of faith in its real finances.
That means taxpayers would have to pay more for priority items like schools and roads.
