COLUMBIA – As families of people with disabilities struggled to find help during the pandemic and waitlists lengthened, the commission running the state Department of Disabilities and Special Needs lavished taxpayer money on themselves, a scathing audit given to Statehouse lawmakers found.
They bought leather chairs, fancy tablecloths, name badges and frames for portraits of themselves hung in the department’s lobby.
Meanwhile, the commissioners were running roughshod over the state’s transparency laws, routinely discussing matters that should have been addressed in open meetings by email and in closed executive sessions.
The breach in protocol came even after they received comprehensive Freedom of Information Act training and warnings from their own lawyer, the Legislative Audit Council report given to the S.C. Senate on March 29 found.
The depth of the alleged abuses stunned lawmakers.
Sen. Penry Gustafson, R-Camden, on the floor of the state Senate in February 2023. File/Alexander Thompson/Staff
“What our constituents complain about is waste in government and having people take advantage of the situation with obviously no parameters, no accountability,” Sen. Penry Gustafson, R-Camden, said during a Senate subcommittee hearing on the audit. “I am personally appalled.”
The report evoked bipartisan fury from state senators who want to pass a bill to eliminate the commission and turn the department into a Cabinet agency with a director who reports to the governor.
The 1,600-employee agency administers Medicaid programs and oversees a care provider network that serves about 13,000 South Carolinians with intellectual and development disabilities.
The commission’s chairwoman, vice chairman and secretary strongly pushed back on the report’s findings in a March 20 letter to the audit council.
Chairwoman Stephanie Rawlinson called the report's allegations that the commission likely violated the state’s Freedom of Information Act “without merit and slanderous.”
Rawlinson said the commission’s old tablecloths were stained and that it was agency officials who requested the new chairs, phones, sound system and televisions.
As to the portraits and a custom-design logo the commission planned to spend $1,000 on last fall, Vice Chairman Barry Malphrus said they were intended “to help the public better understand that the commissioners are there to serve them and are accountable to them.”
Two of the commissioners wrote to the auditors saying they agreed with the report’s findings. Dr. Gary Kocher said in his response that he had unsuccessfully asked for the resignations of the “two or three” commissioners he said are responsible for the bulk of the listed wrongdoing and called for the state to remove those commissioners.
In a statement to The Post and Courier on March 29, the department's interim state director, Constance Holloway, said the agency fully cooperated with the audit but declined to comment further.
Beyond the expenses the report labelled “frivolous,” the commission’s overall expenditures have spiked in recent years, rising from $16,661 in 2019 to $84,472 in 2021 — a five-fold increase — while travel expenses and per diems have risen by 60 percent, the report found.
The auditors said the commissioners steadily increasing the number of their meetings to 53 in 2021 — it was 16 in 2018 — and filing for reimbursements for one-on-one meetings with department staff were responsible for the ballooning expenditures.
The commission’s leadership in their response letter said that because vacancies on the commission were filled and because a Senate committee instructed the commission to take a more active role in overseeing the department in 2017, they had to increase expenses and travel.
The auditors painted a different picture, reporting that the number of meetings went up because commissioners have been micromanaging the department.
“Commissioners are getting involved in writing and rewriting policy (on) something as small as who answers the phone at the front desk,” Marcia Lindsay, the deputy director of the audit council, told the Senate subcommittee.
The auditors reported the micromanagement has turned the relationship between the commission and the department’s leadership toxic, with commissioners telling staff they’d lost their trust and threatening them over personnel decisions.
Meanwhile, on at least three occasions, commissioners — the report did not name them — used their positions to directly contact upper-level department staff with questions or requests related to their disabled family members’ care, something regular citizens cannot do.
Another anecdote that drew senators’ ire was that the department signed an unusual agreement to pay aides for a commissioner who is disabled through the commissioner’s business, and the commissioner filed little documentation to prove the money was flowing to the aides.
Despite receiving thorough FOIA training from an outside law firm in September 2021, commissioners appeared eager to hide what they were doing from the public, the report also alleges.
According to the report, commissioners sent 32 emails to a quorum of members about public business. They also criticized a staff member for sending them a memo reminding them about the state’s open records law, and one commissioner asked in an email: “What do we need to discuss in an open meeting that can’t be resolved outside a ‘public meeting’?”
In March 2022, auditors sat in on the executive session of a commission meeting and watched as the commission members discussed subjects over lunch they weren’t allowed to address out of the public view, even as their own general counsel repeatedly warned them they were violating the law.
“The FOI violations are extraordinarily clear,” said Democratic Sen. Dick Harpootlian, a high-profile Columbia lawyer who has handled public records cases.
“Not only are they clear. We have emails where they talk about how we can avoid the FOI by structuring things," he added. "I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The largest expenditure the commissioners reported which the auditors flagged was $8,314 to soundproof their meeting rooms. The reason, Malphrus, the commission vice chairman, explained in the response letter, is they were worried their conversations might be overheard outside the room — “posing a FOIA risk,” he wrote.
