After years of blistering reports on spending, SC governor's school gets positive audit report (2025)

McCORMICK— A small government agency nestled in rural McCormick County has been pilloried for years over how it doles out tax dollars and the records it keeps of that spending.

But the leaders of South Carolina's youngest governor's school said that's all in the past, pointing to an audit report without findings— its first in a quarter-century.

The positive report follows years of scrutiny for theSouth Carolina Governor’s School for Agriculture at John de la Howe, including problems that came to light from Uncovered, a Post and Courier-led investigative collaboration with 19 community newspapers.

Reporting for the projectrevealed problematic purchasing practices,discovered the school appeared to have bypassed its own HR policiesandunearthed secretive emails that contemplated ousting a whistleblower.

In the wake of the reporting, South Carolina’sinspector general determined the agency violated state law, andauditors delivered a blistering report on how the school spent taxpayer dollars.

The school has often pointed to those problems as growing pains, part of a dramatic shift in mission from a boarding school for troubled children to a residential campus for agriculture-minded students that unfolded amid concerns about a dwindling population and COVID lockdowns.

Those issues are in the past with the positive report, according to the school, which sees the audit as an accomplishment.

"A clean state audit with no findings is a rare thing," school spokesman Tony Baughman said Aug. 2 in an email to media.

How rare? Of the 21 audit reports for state agencies posted for the 2023-24 fiscal year, just six had no findings.

It's especially rare for John de la Howe, which last received an audit report without findings in 1999.

Agency reviews conducted by the Office of the State Auditor differ from the financial audits that local governments undergo yearly.

Aside from not being annual — John de la Howe's average is a review nearly every two years— these engagements act as spot checks instead of the financial deep dive of other audits. It looked at 10 cash receipts, 10 non-payroll disbursements, 10 credit card purchases and three journal entries, among other samplings.

Because of the limited nature of these reviews, auditors don't report a view on the state of an agency's financial statements such as the unmodified opinion normally associated with a clean audit.

Auditors also reviewed past findings and confirmed the school corrected problems found in the last audit, which looked at 2021-22.

The earlier review found the school lacked a complete inventory of state-owned property and missed due dates to submit reporting packages to the Office of Comptroller General, among other problems.

The positive audit comes on the heels of another years-old issue being resolved.

Sharon Wall, who led the school after serving as chairwoman of the South Carolina Board of Education, agreed earlier this year to pay $800 and admit to an ethical breach for taking a consulting job worth $1,500 per day with a company she had hired as a contractor in 2020.

The Post and Courier was the first to bringWall’s ethical lapse to the public’s attention.