Arithmetic Errors pursue McKie

Amelia McKie has trouble filing required reports with the Ethics Commission on time and filing them correctly.

As mentioned in the previous article, she said in a public meeting of the Richland 2 School Board (in January 2019, I believe) that it wouldn't happen again. I understood her to be telling the public that she'd be filing future required reports on time.

Campaign Disclosure Reports due to the South Carolina Ethics Commission are to be filed quarterly. However, McKie's reports for 4/10/2019, 7/10/2019, and 1/10/2020 were filed late.

Her Report due 10/10/2019 was filed on time, and she amended it on 3/4/2020.

On the Amended Report she reports $250.00 in "individual funds" contributed to her campaign. Now, what would cause her to "remember" that contribution five months later? And why didn't she report it correctly and on time?

The next obvious problem (obvious to anyone with a rudimentary skills in arithmetic) is why does she have less money on-hand than was reported in October 2019?  If she received a contribution of $250.00 and didn't incur additional expense (which she didn't), wouldn't she have more money on-hand?

But that's not what her filed Reports show. Her amended report corrected an unexplained error in the original report, but it did not correct the errors that occurred earlier in 2019. Those errors still exist.

This leads me to decide that the Ethics Commission doesn't examine the reports when they are filed. It looks like the Ethics Commission just accepts them as filed.

Then it's up to someone, somewhere, to inspect the reports and alert the Commission to the errors.

The magic of computers ought to make it easy to confirm sums and differences; you know, basic arithmetic calculations. Flags ought to pop when numbers don't agree. But they don't.