Council says “no evidence of criminal activity,” in first public look into spending audit

An outside law firm’s investigation into excessive abuses of spending practices in Beaufort County found no evidence of criminal behavior, a newly released summary of the firm’s report shows.

Notably, the half-dozen pages of the truncated report posted on the county’s website Tuesday evening was more weighted on looking forward to installing better future practices under the new administrator rather than confronting the issues raised by residents at council meetings about the “flagrant” spending abuses under fired administrator Eric Greenway.

The council’s vote to release the summary comes after months of criticism and unhappiness with the county’s lack of transparency in dealing with what the investigation labeled at the time as a willful flouting of the county’s procurement code and “excessive, personal, frivolous” spending on employees’ county purchasing cards.

The county must now hope that releasing Tuesday’s brief report instead of a more complete accounting will reassure residents, many of whom have publicly demanded both accountability for past failures as well as assurances of future transparency, as county leaders ask voters to approve $1 billion in new spending on the November ballot.

In addition to Greenway, several county officials have either left or been fired over the past year. It is unclear why the county waited this long to release the detail that it found no evidence of criminal behavior when it appears to have known this since at least March.

The summary of the investigation, done by Greenville-based law firm Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, shows that 312 of 392 contracts signed during 2023 did not have a competitive bid process. Those contracts, in total, were for $13 million; compared with $85 million for the remaining 80 competitively bid contracts.

The report then cites that just over $6 million worth of p-card purchases, over four years, were reviewed as well.

No information about which contracts were competitive and which weren’t, which county employees were involved in the bid process or which employees misused the p-card system was shared.

Although “some of these failures were significant and, in a few instances, perhaps willful,” the report states the spending problems were a result of misfeasance, not malfeasance.

Malfeasance and misfeasance both mean a wrongdoing or wrongful act. Where they differ is that malfeasance is intentional and misfeasance stems from an accident or misunderstanding of the law.

Ever since the law firm’s March oral report, the county has been vague about whether a written report even existed. The Island Packet twice filed a Freedom of Information Act request for findings with the first on May 2 and the second on June 21. The newspaper received four pages of heavily redacted materials including two pages of an Excel spreadsheet. On Tuesday, Council Chairman Joe Passiment said that a written report from HSB was submitted to the council sometime in mid-June.

Explaining why it took until July 23 for information to be given to the public, Passiment said each member of the council needed to read it and the council wanted to wait until the new administrator Michael Moore was in place. “Because he is the one that has to ultimately do all of the investigations that have been identified in there,” Passiment said.

Before the council went in to executive session to discuss potentially releasing the summary, council members Tom Reitz and Paula Brown pushed to have the discussion in public. Council member David Bartholomew voted in favor but the remaining six council members present voted the motion down.

“I read all the documentation. I don’t know that everybody did,” council member Tab Tabernik said in defending her position to vote in favor of executive session. “And we needed to have a discussion. of what we found and how we would relay that information to the public.”

Tabernik told reporters that the executive session was to address grammar mistakes before making sure the council was comfortable with what they were releasing.

“We’re not keeping anything from the public,” she added.