As millions of Americans conduct their finishing touches on filing their taxes, the Palmetto State has a different problem: finding out who created a secret bank account and how $1.8 billion was deposited into it.
Maybe it's not a hidden account, but how the money got there is a mystery.
It's sort of like that-the state's higher education accounts had money double posted by the comptroller general.
Regarding the $1.8 billion account, it has a paper trail spanning a decade, an investigative task that's certainly not an enviable one: South Carolina has collected about $1.8 billion in a bank account over the past decade - and doesn't know where the money came from or where it was supposed to go.
The bank account, which is now being examined by state and private accountants, is the latest trouble with the state's books and comes after South Carolina's top accountant resigned last year.
Now, lawmakers are asking why the money was parked there in first place and why officials never fixed the problem, [] Whatever caused the bank account errors has not been rectified, and if there are records showing where the $1.8 billion came from, they have not been shared with state leaders.
Elected Republican Treasurer Curtis Loftis, whose job is to write checks for the state, has said he invested the money in the mystery account and made nearly $200 million in interest for the state, which led to questions about why he didn't let the General Assembly know money they either set aside for state agencies or that might have been in a trust fund was just sitting around.
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