Comptroller General Candidate Spotlight: Mike Burkhold

As part of our continuing effort to bring local news that’s impactful to our readers, we’ve proactively reached out to the candidates running for the South Carolina Comptroller General

We will not manipulate their answers in any way, we’ll simply provide to you, our readers. This will allow you to make an informed choice.

This week, we’ll introduce Mike Burkhold

A few years ago, South Carolina’s books were off by $3.5 billion, and it took years for anyone to notice. That fact is the reason I am running for Comptroller General, and I want to tell you who I am and what I would do about it.

I am a lifelong South Carolinian and a graduate of the College of Charleston. In 2009 I started a company in Charleston called Equiscript with no outside money and built it into a business that made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies five years in a row. For seventeen years I signed the checks, read the financial statements, led the team, negotiated the big contracts, and answered for every dollar. When the books were off, the mistake came out of my own pocket. In June I stepped back from running the company day to day, and I now serve on its board. My wife and I live on Sullivan’s Island.

The Comptroller General is the state’s bookkeeper. Every payment the state makes passes through that office before it leaves the Treasury, and the office produces the yearly financial report that is supposed to tell you where the money went. It is a job where getting the numbers right is the whole point.

This year I went looking at those numbers the way I would look at any company’s, and I couldn’t follow them. Neither can most taxpayers, and neither can most of the people who vote on the budget. The reports run hundreds of pages and are written for accountants. No single page tells you what a program was given, what it spent, and what it is sitting on. So I started doing that work myself. Every week I read the state’s own budget and audit documents and publish what I find in plain language, with page numbers, so any taxpayer can check it.

What I found is a system where nobody pays a price for losing track of the money, so the money keeps getting lost. Sometimes it slips out the door through a grant nobody checked. Sometimes it piles up for years in an account nobody counts. You balanced your checkbook and counted every dollar before you sent it in. The minute it left your hands, the counting got a lot looser.

That is fixable, and the Comptroller General can fix part of it without waiting on anyone else. If you elect me, the office will do four things.

First, post every state transaction online in a form a person can follow: who got paid, how much, by which agency, and what for, updated every month. You should be able to look up a company or a school district the way you scroll your own bank statement.

Second, publish one page per state program showing what it was given, what it spent, and what is unspent. That page does not exist anywhere in state government today, and it is the one page a taxpayer or a legislator needs most.

Third, check the books against the bank every month, the way a family checks the bank statement against the checkbook, and publish the result. A $3.5 billion gap does not appear overnight. It grows for years in a book nobody is comparing to anything.

Fourth, use the Comptroller’s seat on the State Fiscal Accountability Authority to encourage more complete audits of the agencies that feed numbers into the state’s report. Many large agencies get only a limited review today, and the state’s books cannot be right if the agencies’ books are not.

And if the state’s financial report is late or wrong, that is on me. I ran a company where the books were mine and so were the mistakes. That is the posture I will bring to this office.

South Carolina is a good state that could be the best-run in the country. A state that counts its money honestly can argue about taxes and spending from solid ground instead of guesswork. You cannot get there until you can count. I can count, I can explain the count, and I have spent this year proving it in public.

If you want to see the work before you vote, it is all at count.burkhold.net. Every Tuesday I publish a short piece on one place the state’s money sits or moves, written for people who balance a checkbook, not for accountants, with the page numbers so you can check me. It is free, and you can subscribe by email so it lands in your inbox. I would be grateful for your vote on November 3.