‘We owe the taxpayers answers.’ Richland councilman wants penny tax audits released
After Richland County and the South Carolina Department of Revenue settled their legal fight over the county’s penny tax program, one county councilman is calling for more answers than the settlement provides, he said.
Councilman Joe Walker III said in a text message he will renew his call “to release ALL audit results of the penny (tax spending),” as well as compliance and performance audits of the penny tax program’s former managers, a consortium of three private companies known as the program development team or PDT.
“We owe the taxpayers answers,” Walker said. “I intend to find them and make them public.”
The penny tax was passed in a 2012 referendum and was designed to improve roads, create sidewalks and build greenways as well as help fund the public bus system. The tax is set to collect a bit more than $1 billion over 23 years.
In 2015, the county council chairman at the time said the county was going to hire a forensic auditor to review penny tax spending after the revenue department challenged how the money was being spent.
The county paid for a a firm to audit the penny program but the firm would not allow the report to be publicly released, The State reported in August 2019. The audit identified “significant deficiencies” in the program’s management, according to a portion of the report presented to the council the previous May.
In December 2019, The State reported on a separate revenue department audit of Richland County’s penny tax money and how it was used by the PDT. The audit found a total of $41.4 million had been misspent between 2013 and 2018.
The county and the revenue department had sued each other over the use of penny tax money prior to the audit.
The county announced Wednesday that those suits were settled. The county agreed to pay more than $15 million into the penny tax fund and the revenue department dropped its suit and stated that it found the county hadn’t engaged in any wrongdoing.
Walker said in the text message he was “glad to see this portion of this particular story come to an end” whiling pinning the penny program quagmire on previous council members, saying it “is a shame, if not negligent, councils past did not have the appropriate safeguards in place from the beginning of the Penny to protect against ANY waste or abuse of taxpayer funds.”
While he’s glad the lawsuit chapter of the penny program is over, “conclusion and transparency are two different things,” Walker said.
