Beaufort County Council thinks it can keep years of financial wrongdoing secret. Don’t let it. | Opinion

After I wrote last month’s column on Beaufort County’s desire to raise your taxes even though it can’t be trusted with your money, I emailed it to all 11 County Council members seeking their feedback and saying I hoped they can regain trust “by being more transparent and trustworthy.”

I told them a good first step would be to release a written report on the procurement and purchasing problems that have bedeviled the county for too long and that have only grown with the county’s intractable, inexplicable refusal to make public the $350,000 audit on those issues.

Two of the 11 council members replied within hours. The others didn’t reply at all.

Tom Reitz wrote, “Thank you, Mr. Hall.” Paula Brown wrote, “I believe with the New Administrator that we hired, Mr. Michael Moore, he will be a breath of fresh air and will be able to turn things around” and CC’d Moore, whom the council may have hired illegally in May .

If that woeful response wasn’t an indication that the County Council has no desire to discuss the audit, this certainly was: On Tuesday , the council released a six-page summary of what it would do to correct at least five years of procurement-card failures and called it the report on the issue.

If you didn’t think the county was covering up the problem, you now have six pages of proof that that is exactly what it is trying to do. The “report” is a joke. It’s a laughable effort by legal counsel to say there is nothing to see here and an unacceptable effort to move on without showing what went wrong. Taxpayers and residents shouldn’t let the council get away with it. They should demand to see the full audit as soon as possible, and they should remember anyone who won’t agree to that at the next election, and vote against any incumbent seeking to retain their seat.

One elected official at least is outraged the public can’t see the full audit. Sheriff P.J. Tanner’s office has demanded a full, unredacted copy.

“They just don’t want you to know the details, and obviously they don’t want law enforcement to have or know the details surrounding the issues of Beaufort County for the past couple of years,” Tanner said. “The county has never provided us anything. They circled the wagons early on and it’s been like that for a year.”

Chairman Joseph Passiment has hoped this whole thing would go away for months. In March, he and the council allowed the consultant it hired to audit the procurement process for hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to give just a verbal report without delivering a written report.

Right after, Passiment apologized — not for county officials’ woeful financial management or the county council’s terrible oversight or even the consultants’ failure to document the wrongdoing in writing. He apologized for Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, P.A. airing the county’s problems publicly.

“To the members of the audience and those looking on, I’m sorry that you had to listen to all of this, but it was very important that you understand that we did not take this lightly,” he said. “We spent an extensive amount of time, energy and money to ensure that we are as transparent as we possibly can (be). Mistakes were made, we have acknowledged those mistakes, and we’re moving on.” Moving on? There was actual applause in the audience when he finished speaking.

That was after he and the public had just been told that the county’s p-card use increased 85 percent from $1,104,808 in 2019 to $2,039,467 in 2023, that 172 county staff members had p-cards at one point, that the cards’ use was found to be “excessive, personal, frivolous and not business driven and often in violation of the county’s p-card manual,” that purchases included office decor, office holiday decorations, office furniture, an Apple watch, a Bible annotator, “inappropriate” books, earbuds, headsets, cellphone cases, office snacks, meals and flowers.

After that verbal report was made, there were no questions from council members and no requests for a written report. It was government representation and watchdogging at its worst.

Emails sent later among council members obtained by Hilton Head Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette reporter Sebastian Lee show that council members Reitz and David Bartholomew were rightly indignant afterward about the council’s stiff-arming of the public.

Reitz wrote, “There’s no reason to operate under a cloak of secrecy if we are doing everything in the best interests of our constituents,” and Bartholomew wrote, “I cannot shake the feeling that we are being kept in the dark whether it be intentional or unintentional.”

Yet despite requests from reporters and the public for the written audit, the council refused to release the audit. At a meeting Tuesday, it instead sought to move on again, saying nothing.

The “report” reads like a hollow promise to avoid missteps by following new steps, preceded by a too terse summary that “some Beaufort County staff” — without saying who — “failed to adhere to the County’s procurement and P-card guidelines” — without saying how. It says, “These failings, however, more likely than not, resulted from misfeasance rather than malfeasance, and no evidence of criminal activity has been discovered. Some of these failures were significant and, in a few instances, perhaps willful.”

Did its authors and the council really find this sufficient? More likely than not? Perhaps? The consultant must be laughing all the way to the bank.

A statement from Passiment again unacceptably suggested the public shouldn’t expect to see the details, which clearly exist. “County Council has thoroughly reviewed the detailed documentation from Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd, P.A. about procurement and P-card analyses, and has put together a plan for our Administrator to move forward to ensure Beaufort County is getting the best supplies, materials, and labor for the most reasonable cost. We are committed to restoring the public’s trust and look forward to moving forward through this process.”

In other words, the lawyers hired for a $350,000 cover-up admit “some” of the “failures” were “significant” and may have been “willful,” but the public can’t see them outlined in writing. Speaking of failure, elected officials who won’t demand the audit’s release are failing at their job.

The trust of residents and taxpayers, let alone municipal bond buyers, won’t be restored, nor should it, until that full audit is released. How can the public have any faith that county officials are acting appropriately, or that council members are strong financial stewards, if it can not assess for itself what went wrong?

There is no moving forward without releasing the audit that residents and taxpayers paid for and have every right and expectation to review. “Take our word for it” is a horrible approach for any elected official, especially those who have shown and admitted they don’t deserve your trust.

I await the emails from County Council members on this column and hope that some of them will admit they want to release the audit — and then push publicly, and successfully, to do it.