THE PEOPLE'S ACCOUNTANT: Why Tiffany Boozer Says South Carolina's Books Should Be Kept by an Accountant
- Javar Juarez
- 1 hour ago
- 7 min read
By Javar Juarez | New Progressive Journal | July 9, 2026
For nearly twenty years, South Carolina has been forced to reckon with the consequences of getting public accounting wrong.
The price of those failures now exceeds $5 billion.
Tiffany Boozer doesn't believe the solution is complicated.
"The state's accountant should be an accountant."
It is a statement so straightforward that it almost sounds self-evident.
Yet behind those eight words lies one of the most consequential questions facing South Carolina's government: Who should be trusted to safeguard the people's money?
Before dismissing her answer as too simple, it's worth examining the problem she believes it solves.
A State That Already Ran the Experiment
South Carolina does not have to imagine what happens when the office responsible for the state's books is not led by someone trained to keep them.
It has the receipts.
For four years, from 2007 to 2011, then-Comptroller General Richard Eckstrom's office overstated South Carolina's general fund balance by an estimated $3.5 billion, the result of double-counted entries made during a conversion to a new accounting system.
The error compounded, unnoticed, for more than a decade before Eckstrom resigned his post in March 2023.
It did not stop there.
In 2023 and 2024, the State Treasurer's Office surfaced what looked, on paper, like a $1.8 billion windfall sitting in a dormant account.
A forensic audit by the outside firm AlixPartners found that most of it — roughly $1.6 billion — simply did not exist.
It was a phantom balance created when non-cash appropriations were folded into cash accounts during another system migration, the same category of error Boozer describes when she talks about the difference between money and the appearance of money on a ledger.
State Senator Larry Grooms put South Carolina's combined accounting miscalculations, across both scandals, at more than $5 billion. The investigation into the Treasurer's error alone cost taxpayers upward of $7 million in legal and consulting fees before it was resolved.
That is the ledger Boozer is actually running against.
Not an abstraction about professionalism. A documented decade and a half in which the state's constitutional accounting offices missed, mismanaged, or misunderstood their own numbers by a sum larger than several state agencies' annual budgets combined.
And yet South Carolina law requires almost nothing of the person entrusted to prevent it from happening again. A candidate for Comptroller General need only be 18, a registered voter, and a resident of the state.
"The bar is really low," Boozer told me. "When you're talking about oversight of billions of dollars, there's no billion-dollar company that doesn't have a CPA on staff. This is an accounting office. We oversee the books of South Carolina."
The Auditor's Eye
Boozer is not simply a CPA. She is an auditor — currently a Quality Assurance Manager inside the Comptroller General's Office itself, functioning as an internal check on the same office she's running to lead. That distinction matters more than it might sound.
Auditors are trained not to take a clean-looking number at face value, but to ask what produced it.
She offered an example that has nothing to do with dishonesty and everything to do with discipline: an employee who never takes vacation.
"If somebody never steps away from the books," she explained, "that can be a red flag, because the next person might discover something they weren't supposed to see."
It wasn't an accusation. It was a demonstration of how she reads a system — the same instinct that, applied at scale, is supposed to catch a conversion error before it becomes a $3.5 billion one.
"Your money is paying into the state tax system in every direction," she said. "The state is responsible for providing services, and we have to be responsible with your money, because it's your money."
Not the government's money. Yours.
She Wasn't Supposed to Be the Candidate
Boozer did not plan to run for statewide office. She entered the Comptroller General's race on the final day of filing — for a seat with no incumbent defending it. Brian Gaines, appointed by Governor McMaster in 2023 to stabilize the office after Eckstrom's resignation, chose not to seek election to the seat in his own right, leaving it open for the first time in decades.
Getting to the ballot wasn't a walkover, either. Boozer faced a fellow CPA, Bruce Cole — a real estate developer and educator with a Ph.D. in planning to go along with his accounting credentials — in the Democratic primary, and won.
Her general election opponent, Republican Mike Burkhold, a businessman and 1998 congressional nominee, carries no accounting credential of his own.
Working inside the office as its internal auditor, she watched it operate year after year without anyone at the top who spoke the language fluently — and she treated that continuing as a real possibility, not a distant one.
"So somebody had to do it," she says, almost matter-of-factly.
That same instinct — do the job nobody else is positioned to do correctly — runs through the rest of her biography, and it's worth reading her personal story as evidence of that discipline rather than as a separate chapter from her professional one.
She became a mother during her freshman year of college. She did not leave school. She transferred, worked full-time, raised her daughter, and finished her accounting degree — then passed the CPA exam, one of the most demanding professional licensure tests in the country, and built a career as a licensed professional. Her daughter is now a rising college junior who has watched the entire arc of it.
"Based on where I was in life — having my daughter at 18 years old — I should have been a statistic," Boozer said. "It's a blessing that I'm not. I hope to inspire people to know that your life isn't over if you have a baby early. It's harder, but you can make it. You can play the hand you're dealt without playing it in a way that's going to cause you to lose. You can still win."
It is the same argument, applied to a life instead of a ledger: the outcome is not fixed by the starting conditions.
What matters is the discipline you bring to the system you're handed.
Refusing the Room's Assumptions
That same refusal to accept a predetermined outcome showed up again, in a different register, after the Democratic primary produced a five-member statewide ticket on which every nominee is Black — a fact many observers, understandably, called historic. Boozer didn't dispute the history. She pushed back on what she sees as a reflex within some corners of the Black community to treat every statewide race as "unwinnable" before it starts.
"It's almost like we're constantly reminded, 'You're Black. This is South Carolina,'" she said. "And honestly, sometimes it's Black people who have the more defeated mindset. They're making it more about color than anybody else."
She was born in Clinton, and her family later moved to Columbia, where she was enrolled at Lower Richland High School as a teenager. She remembers the culture shock of a nearly all-Black student body after growing up in more racially mixed company. 'We were shell-shocked,' she laughed. 'We were trying to figure out, "Wait — only Black people go here?"'
What she took from that whiplash, by her own account, was not caution but comfort. She says she has never treated a room's demographics as a referendum on whether she belonged in it.
"I'm extremely comfortable in my own skin," she told me. "I don't walk into rooms where people don't look like me and feel like an imposter at all. I don't have a subservient attitude toward myself or toward the way I look. This is how I look. Here I am."
That posture was on display at the Fort Mill Candidate Stomp, a York County crowd inside Charlotte's suburban orbit where most attendees had never heard her name before that night. Winning statewide in South Carolina still requires garnering white votes, and there were visible looks in the room — a few raised eyebrows, a beat of appraisal — as she took the floor. She didn't rework the pitch for it. She gave the same argument about ledgers and discipline she'd give anywhere, and let the room decide for itself.
The Argument Underneath the Argument
Watching Boozer work a room built on precisely the kind of skepticism the state's own financial history has earned, it becomes hard to separate her candidacy from the scandal that preceded it. South Carolina spent nearly two decades and more than five billion dollars finding out what happens when its books are kept by people who did not think like auditors.
Even the man currently holding the office proves the point. Brian Gaines, installed by Governor McMaster specifically to stabilize the agency after Eckstrom's resignation, holds a Certified Public Manager credential and a master's in public administration — not a CPA. That's not a knock on Gaines, who by most accounts restored competent leadership to an office in crisis. It's evidence of how low the state's own bar remains, even after the failure that should have raised it.
Boozer's pitch is not that accountants are incorruptible. It's that they are trained to ask the one question that might have stopped both scandals before they metastasized: what actually produced this number?
She is not running as a symbol.
She is running as a corrective — a specific, credentialed answer to a specific, quantified failure, tested first in a primary against another accountant and now put to voters against an opponent with no accounting background at all.
Whether South Carolina voters connect those dots in November may say as much about the state's appetite for accountability as it does about Tiffany Boozer.
"The state's accountant should be an accountant."
After the last fifteen years, it's less a slogan than a diagnosis.
Javar Juarez is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Urban Broadcast Network (CUBN), an independent investigative news outlet based in Columbia, South Carolina, and a member of the South Carolina Press Association. He is also President of the Capital City Chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.