Oconee Council rejects call for audit on overtaxing issue

WALHALLA — Four out of five members of the Oconee County Council rejected a call Tuesday for a special, independent audit of the county’s financial condition.

The consensus of the four was that the council should look ahead to controlling future county spending rather than waste time and money revisiting an alleged incident of overtaxing they regard as a settled issue.

Council Chairman Reg Dexter said he had been informed that such an audit could cost from $250,000 up to $1 million or more.

Council member Wayne McCall made the motion that the county engage an auditor to carry out what McCall termed a compliance audit, which he described as “something we used to do at the shipyards.” McCall described such as audit as revealing how money had been spent and whether it had been spent efficiently.

“We need to find out how we got here,” McCall said. “How we got in this condition.”

Council member Joel Thrift seconded McCall’s motion, though Thrift said that his own consultations with certified public accountants about such an audit had produced only puzzlement.

“They don’t know what it is,” Thrift said. “It sounds more like an efficiency report.”

McCall segued his motion into a revisiting of claims originating with County Treasurer Greg Nowell that the county had overtaxed county residents in ways that left the county with about $43 million in cash reserves.

The motion was defeated 4-1.

At the heart of Nowell’s claim, first made last year, was the contention that a lump-sum 2006 payment by Duke Energy of $24 million that corrected a three-year-old assessment error resulted in an error of increased millage rates. That, in turn, may have created an overpayment by county taxpayers initially pegged at as much as $72 million.

In October of last year the South Carolina Department of Revenue issued a report of an audit that found no support for Nowell’s claims.

In recent weeks, however, full-page advertisements in a local newspaper praised McCall for his continued resolve in keeping the issue in the forefront at the same time calling on the public to demand more answers from the other council members. The targeted council members have questioned the motives behind the advertisements.

At the council’s last meeting, a motion by McCall to use $6 million of county cash reserves to fund a cut of this year’s property tax rate died for lack of a second. He has repeatedly called for some of the alleged reserves to be returned to the public.

Council member Paul Corbeil confronted the claims of the county’s massing large reserves Tuesday with a breakdown of the county’s total cash on hand as of the end of the last fiscal year, June 30.

Beginning with a figure of $49.44 million, Corbeil presented on the council chambers visual screen a breakdown that deducted such amounts as $8 million for debt service sinking funds, $29 million in special revenue funds, other encumbered funds and outstanding work orders and procurement expenses amounting to $29 million. Rolling reserves that offset delays in tax collection amounted to another $18 million.

So, Corbeil said, the county’s total ready cash trove is about $602,000.

“This is a far more accurate cash position than you’ve read about,” Corbeil told the audience, referring to the claims in newspaper advertisements. “We’re not sitting on a pot of gold.”

Corbeil said consultations with Nowell had produced agreement that a financial audit of the county wasn’t needed, but that the county would need to control spending in future budgets.

When a new permanent administrator is hired, Corbeil said, he would favor a finding on how to improve efficiency in county spending.

“But that would be premature now,” he told McCall. “But a look at what were spending and how were spending it is not a compliance audit.”

Dexter suggested that Nowell address a future council meeting about what a compliance audit would involve.

“But I personally need to know what the audit is and what it would cost,” Dexter said. “I’m concerned about a lot of the taxpayers’money going in many directions.”

Dexter outlined how the county’s finances were already audited yearly by an outside auditor, showing a clean result, and reasserted his confidence in the county’s own finance department headed by Finance Director Kendra Brown.