Treasurer Pleads Case to Senate Over $1.8B Error

South Carolina's Republican-dominated Senate and its elected GOP treasurer faced off Monday in an extraordinary hearing as senators try to kick the treasurer out of office over a $1.8 billion accounting error. The hearing is the culmination of over two years of investigation by the Senate that started when state accountants unintentionally exaggerated money given to colleges and universities by $3.5 billion, the AP reports. That led to the discovery of an error that started a decade ago when the state was changing from one accounting system to another. If accountants couldn't balance the entries in the two sets of books as they moved thousand of accounts with different definitions, they kept adding it to a special account until it grew to $1.8 billion.

It took forensic accountants, who were paid millions of dollars in fees, to finally unravel that nearly all of the $1.8 billion was not real money but just an accumulation of errors. The two Republican senators calling for Treasurer Curtis Loftis to be kicked out of office said he can no longer be trusted to handle South Carolina's bank accounts. They charged that he is incompetent and never reported the mistakes to lawmakers as required by law while refusing to take accountability. "He's a liar that was so concerned with his public appearance that he would do and say anything to cover up his mistake," Sen. Stephen Goldfinch said.

Loftis has said that no money went missing and that the errors were not made in his office, though others have testified differently. His lawyer opened the treasurer's case with a photo of Loftis and President Trump on a screen. "Let issues like this be decided at the ballot box," Deborah Barbier said. The Senate would need a two-thirds vote to decide Loftis committed "willful neglect of duty" and send the matter to the House, which would need its own two-thirds vote to remove the treasurer. The books still haven't been fully straightened out, GOP Sen. Larry Grooms said. "Because of his failures, the self-proclaimed best friend of the taxpayer is costing the taxpayers tens of millions in legal, auditing and oversight fees," Grooms said. "With friends like this, who needs tax-and-spend liberals."

(More South Carolina stories.)