Employment Agency Audit To Spread Blame Around

By FITSNews || Sources familiar with a forthcoming Legislative Audit Council report on South Carolina’s Employment Security Commission tell FITS that there will be plenty of blame to go around for the agency’s atrocious record over the last few years.

That’s good …

After all, it only stands to reason that when an agency cannot perform its basic function (and goes from $850 million in the black to $740 million in the red as a result), then heads should roll from here to Gardenia.

Or Garden City, at least.

Of course that won’t happen in South Carolina, where doofuses wasting billions of taxpayer dollars is par for the course – particularly when state lawmakers are in charge. Anyway, the long-awaited report – which will be released Tuesday – comes as a handful of “Republican” lawmakers are making reform of this agency a top “legislative priority.”

Bullsh*t.

Some of today’s grandstanding politicians (including House Speaker Bobby Harrell and Majority Leader Kenny Bingham) voted to approve three of their former cronies to lead this agency- and then everybody just fell asleep at the switch as its billion dollar reserve fund disappeared and turned into a $740 million deficit.

Now they want to be “reformers?”

Please …

Seriously, we’ve been over this before with respect to the ESC … everybody’s to blame.

Specifically, sources tell FITS that the report will outline how the ESC notified lawmakers of the impending fiscal calamity at the agency well in advance – and were ignored.

In fact, at a 2007 hearing before a bipartisan legislative panel, commissioner William McLeod told lawmakers “we are going bankrupt in eighteen months,” a prediction which obviously came true.

We’re also told that S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford’s office – which belatedly championed ESC reform beginning in December of 2008 – was told that a crisis was on the horizon long before it decided to make political hay over the issue.  Recently, Sanford has proposed scrapping the current commission structure in favor of a Cabinet level “Department of Workforce,” although that doesn’t really strike us as reform so much as a bureaucratic reshuffling.

Also, unknown at this point is whether or not the report will delve into accusations of union shakedowns, pay-to-play scams and sex-for-hire scandals.

We sure hope so … particularly on the latter point.  After all, ever since Bridget Keeney disappeared to Canada, we’ve been missing our erotic fiction fix.