Editorial: How many brazen clerks of court does it take to turn on a legislative lightbulb? (2024)

Remember back in 2022, when we had a single brazen county clerk of court who was audacious enough to think she could get away with giving herself a $30,000 raise —after the Williamsburg County Council rejected her request?

You can almost understand why the S.C. Legislature didn’t do anything about it: It was just one crazy outlier, in an easily overlookable little Democratic county, lawmakers might reasonably have concluded; no need to fix a one-off problem.

Remember back in 2023, when we learned it wasn’t a one-off, and it was bipartisan? That Williamsburg County Clerk Sharon Staggers had been joined by Hampton County Clerk Becky Hill, a Republican who also unilaterally decided how much she should be paid— something no one should be able to do unless they own their own business.

Ms. Hill, who granted herself $15,500 in bonuses, at least had the decency to resign after news broke about all that … well, that and all the other stuff South Carolina's most notorious clerk is facing.

Again, though, crickets from the Legislature.

Oh, for those simpler days.

Today, the Post and Courier’s Thad Moore reports, we know at least six clerks have used federal child support enforcement funds to inflate their own pay. With the emphasis on at least. When Mr. Moore requested records from all 46 counties, he found that clerks in Barnwell, Chesterfield, Colleton and Jasper counties also had given themselves bonuses in recent years.

It's probably more. Some counties provided incomplete information. Some demanded hundreds of dollars simply to let him look at public records. Richland County claimed the records didn't exist. And Dillon County didn’t respond.

His review didn’t go back far enough to count the Beaufort County clerk of court who pleaded guilty in 2011 to using the federal funds to pay her husband tens of thousands of dollars. Nor did it count the clerks who used the federal money for stays at beachfront hotels in Myrtle Beach, often to attend conferences put on by the S.C. Association of Clerks of Court and Registers of Deeds.

The Department of Social Services distributes the federal funds to the clerks but doesn’t check behind them. Maybe we could understand that if the agency said it didn’t have the capacity or mandate to monitor how the clerks use the money; instead, it said the program works just fine. We hope Gov. Henry McMaster noticed that.

An attorney general’s opinion issued in November concluded that a court would probably strike down the bonuses, but that won’t happen unless someone sues. And evenif Gov. McMaster explains to DSS officials the scope of their responsibility to the public, we still need legislative action.

There are two ways lawmakers could fix this problem. The most direct is to make it specifically and clearly illegal for clerks of court, or any other public officials with individual access to public funds, to increase their own pay. They also would need to require better reporting and monitoring of clerks’ expenditures to increase the chances that clerks would get caught if they did try to pay themselves extra, and provide penalties significant enough to serve as a deterrent.

Better still— because this would address other problems we know about as well as all sort of shenanigans we haven’t yet discovered — would be to stop forcing voters to hire and fire clerks, whose bureaucratic job is to summon citizens for jury duty, announce verdicts, keep court filings in order, safeguard evidence after trials conclude and, in child support cases, bridge the state’s bureaucracy with the courts.

We need to elect people who perform discretionary tasks— prosecutors, for instance, and mayors and governors and legislators and city and county council members. We don’t need to elect people to do ministerial jobs — starting with clerks and extending to treasurers and coroners and comptroller generals and state agency directors. People who fill those positions need expertise and ability rather than political appeal. And they need bosses who can fire them when they do inappropriate things— such as raising their own pay.

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