County Spending Records Available Online to Nearly Two-Thirds of SC Residents

March 4, 2014
For Immediate Release

Columbia, S.C. – With Fairfield County government recently implementing online spending transparency, nearly two-thirds of South Carolina residents have ready access to expenditure data from their home counties, according to an analysis by S.C. Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom’s Office. 

Fairfield County Administrator Milton Pope said, “We are pleased to offer the County’s public finance documents on-line for easy citizen retrieval and link to the SC Comptroller’s Office to join other agencies in their support and promotion of transparency.” 

Fifteen of South Carolina’s 46 counties voluntarily post their check registers on their websites, including many of the state’s most densely populated counties, namely Charleston, Greenville, Horry, Richland and Spartanburg counties. 

More than 2.8 million people live in the 15 counties combined – roughly 61.2 percent of the state’s 4.62 million population in 2010, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. (For more on these numbers, please see the table below.) 

Fairfield County is the most recent county to begin posting online its monthly vendor payment files (http://www.fairfieldsc.com/secondary.aspx?pageID=361). 

Eckstrom’s office maintains a consolidated transparency website that includes spending data voluntarily provided by local governments in the Palmetto State. This S.C. Fiscal Transparency Website is located at: http://www.cg.sc.gov/fiscaltransparency/Pages/default.aspx.

In addition to including 15 counties, the section of the website providing the monthly spending detail of local governments also includes 20 municipalities and every school district in the state. 

Eckstrom’s office has worked with the South Carolina Association of Counties and the Municipal Association of South Carolina to increase access to local government transparency for South Carolinians. 

“I encourage all levels of government to provide this information,” Eckstrom says. “Besides its obvious benefits to taxpayers and other interested parties like the media, transparent government spending is becoming the expected standard rather than the leading-edge initiative it was just a few years ago.” 

When Eckstrom launched the S.C. Fiscal Transparency Website for state agencies in March 2008, few states provided spending information online. Today, virtually all states do. 

Eckstrom says his office is available to help local governments wanting to provide Internet-based spending transparency with technical assistance or website capacity. “We can provide free guidance for any county or municipality wanting to provide spending transparency on its own website, or we can make available a complimentary separate page on ours for that purpose,” he says. 

In addition to advising government units on ways to become financially transparent, Eckstrom’s office monitors the spending and pays invoices on behalf of state agencies. It also processes bimonthly payrolls for nearly 45,000 state employees, issuing them W-2s each year to file their tax returns. 

Eckstrom is the first certified public accountant to serve as South Carolina’s comptroller general. 

For more information please contact Eric Ward, public information director, at 803-734-2538; 803-206-6293 or eward@cg.sc.gov.

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