County Council spending

By Charles Sowell  

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011 7:54 a.m. (0)

More than $3.5 million was transferred from an account at the Spartanburg County Jail designated for building a new detention facility and used to balance the county’s budget without county council’s knowledge, officials confirmed to the Journal this week.

“When I took over the jail and started looking over the books I found about $200,000 in one account that should have had about $4 million in it,” Sheriff Chuck Wright said.

The money came largely from payments for housing federal prisoners, inmate canteen receipts and a few other sources, Wright said.

Council Chairman Jeff Horton said council had no idea the money was being used for purposes other than saving for building a new jail until Wright asked about it and council confronted former county administrator Glenn Breed.

“Glenn told us they’d used $1.5 million to balance the budget for this year,” Horton said. “We asked about putting the money back into the account and were amazed to hear that the county didn’t have the money to do that.”

Horton’s account of the confrontation was confirmed by Councilman David Britt who said, “The idea that this had been going on for some time without council’s knowledge was surprising, to say the least.”

The latest revelation about county government comes on the tail of a blistering audit of the county recreation department that found systematic issues with record retention, purchasing and reimbursement procedures.

Asked why earlier audits of county finances didn’t turn the problems up sooner, Horton and Britt said last year’s audit did note problems with purchasing procedures.

“We told Breed to send a letter out to all county department heads telling them to adhere to policy when we found out about it,” Horton said. “Evidently that letter was never sent.”

Breed was fired last month and former recreation department head Jeff Caton was fired earlier this year.

Horton said more terminations are likely within county government over the recreation department audit and other issues that have come to light since then.

Britt and Horton confirmed late last week that three high ranking county officials had been put on permanent leave over issues within their departments.

Stan Halliday of the Spartanburg auditing firm McAbee, Talbert, Halliday & Co. told council last week in the public unveiling of the audit findings that copies of recreation department purchase orders and requisitions from all county departments are missing from 2009.

He also said there is the possibility that payments were split between more than one check to avoid additional scrutiny; there are missing receipts for purchases made on county credit cards; payments on invoices did not follow procurement ordinance requirements; and there was a lack of oversight on shifting of funds between accounts for building Tyger River Park.

Wright said he turned the results of his investigation over to the state Law Enforcement Division several weeks ago to avoid any potential conflict of interest.

Halliday said elements of the audit are ongoing.

County officials hope to have new record-keeping and oversight procedures and policies soon for the full council to consider after an ad-hoc committee of council members and county officials finish looking at long-standing record-keeping problems.

In an expected move after Halliday’s presentation last week council voted to extend the audit to the Delinquent Tax Office.