SC DSS Unlawfully Covered $1.8M in Child Care Fees
Summary
South Carolina's Department of Social Services has paid $1,790,802 since August 2021 to cover fingerprint-scan background checks for child care workers -- a cost state law puts squarely on the worker or the child care facility that employs them, not the state, under S.C. Code Section 63-13-40(D)(10). The state's own watchdog, the Legislative Audit Council, states plainly that DSS is violating state law by picking up the tab, using federal grant money the Council found no requirement to spend this way. DSS has also waived the $8 Central Registry background-check fee it used to charge job applicants, forgoing roughly $202,000 a year in revenue it collected for six straight years before the waiver -- and, asked whether it plans to reinstate either fee, a DSS official said no. The same audit found South Carolina's child care licensing pipeline running far past the pace its own law contemplates: the median regular license took 243 days to issue in a sample of 50 providers -- well beyond the 90-day response window the law sets for the earlier provisional-license determination -- with one provider waiting 878 days, nearly two and a half years.
A law with the bill assigned, and an agency that picked it up anyway
S.C. Code Section 63-13-40(D)(10) is direct: "The prospective employee or childcare facility shall be responsible for any fees associated with any and all required background checks." DSS started covering the cost anyway in August 2021, paying the state's fingerprinting vendor, IDEMIA Identity & Security USA LLC, using money from three federal grants. The Legislative Audit Council checked all three grants and found none of them requires DSS to spend the money this way -- meaning the coverage is a choice, not a federal mandate DSS is following.
View data as table
| What state law assigns to the prospective employee or child care facility | 0 | S.C. Code 63-13-40(D)(10) makes the worker or facility responsible for this cost, capped at actual processing cost. |
|---|---|---|
| What DSS actually paid IDEMIA, using federal grant funds | 1,790,802 | The Legislative Audit Council found no requirement that these three federal grants be used to cover background-check costs. |
A single fingerprint scan costs between $32.75 and $40 depending on the provider type, and DSS told auditors it has no plans to stop paying or to reinstate the fees. The audit frames this as more than a compliance gap: using federal money this way is an opportunity cost, since DSS could instead direct those same grant dollars toward helping providers upgrade facilities to qualify for the state's ABC Quality program, which offers scholarships that help parents afford care.
A second fee, waived and not coming back
DSS ran a companion program the same way. The state also charges an $8 fee to check job applicants against South Carolina's Central Registry of Child Abuse and Neglect -- and DSS collected roughly $200,000 a year from it for six straight years before waiving the fee starting in fiscal year 2021-22. Asked whether the agency planned to reinstate either fee, a DSS official told auditors there were no plans to do so.
View data as table
| FY 2015-16 | 235,043 | |
|---|---|---|
| FY 2016-17 | 214,696 | |
| FY 2017-18 | 203,792 | |
| FY 2018-19 | 206,181 | |
| FY 2019-20 | 179,579 | |
| FY 2020-21 | 175,510 | |
| FY 2021-22 (fee waived mid-year) | 304 | The year DSS waived the fee. |
| FY 2022-23 | 0 | |
| FY 2023-24 | 0 | |
| FY 2024-25 | 0 | DSS has no plans to reinstate the fee, despite the Legislative Audit Council's recommendation to do so immediately. |
The Legislative Audit Council's own math shows what the waiver has cost: in the six fiscal years before it, the fee brought in an average of about $202,000 a year; in the three full fiscal years since, it has brought in nothing. The audit notes that revenue could have funded an online provider portal or offset the licensing office's own operating costs -- the same office now short-staffed and slow. Auditors also found covering the fee has a side effect: because the cost barrier is gone, some child care workers get background checks more often than the law requires (once every five years, or after a six-month employment gap under Section 63-13-40(D)(6)), adding unnecessary work for the DSS staff who process them.
The licensing pipeline itself runs well past its own clock
The same chapter of the audit measured how long it actually takes to get licensed. S.C. Code Section 63-13-420(D) gives DSS 90 days to approve or deny a complete application before a provisional license is automatically granted. In a random sample of 50 providers, the median total time from a provider's first application form to a provisional license was 121 days; to a full regular license, 243 days -- with one provider waiting 878 days, nearly two and a half years. Auditors are careful to note that some of this reflects applicants' own pace submitting the 13 required forms and documents, which is outside DSS's control and doesn't start the statutory clock -- but even accounting for that, the gap between the law's 90-day window and a quarter-year-plus median wait is wide.
View data as table
| Statutory response window, once an application is complete | 90 | S.C. Code 63-13-420(D): DSS must approve or deny within 90 days of a complete application, or a provisional license issues automatically. |
|---|---|---|
| Median total time, provisional license (sample of 50) | 121 | Measured from the applicant's first form submission, which can predate DSS's own 90-day clock. |
| Median total time, regular license (sample of 50) | 243 | |
| Longest wait recorded, regular license | 878 | Nearly two and a half years from first application form to a regular license. |
The delays have a workforce cost the audit ties directly back to the fingerprinting system: of 402 providers who answered a survey question about licensing delays, 8.71% pointed to the availability of staff background-check appointments, and providers separately reported losing qualified applicants and struggling to maintain required staffing ratios because of how long the process takes. Part of the bottleneck traces to the state's own fingerprinting contractor -- auditors found IDEMIA is not meeting its contract's fixed-site requirement in any of South Carolina's four licensing regions, and that five counties have no fingerprinting location at all. One part of the system does work as designed: DSS's own background-investigation office turns most checks around in a median of 9 days, with fewer than 2% of 521 reviewed cases missing the federal 45-day requirement.
What the audit wants DSS to do
The Legislative Audit Council's recommendations are specific and immediate: stop covering fingerprint-scan costs now, or ask the General Assembly to amend six statute sections that currently forbid it; reinstate the Central Registry check fee immediately. The audit also flagged smaller accounting lapses in the same program -- a $7,566.75 refund posted to the wrong ledger account, stray sub-$100 transactions in an account that should have held none, and $5,000 in one region's postage costs assigned to another -- errors DSS acknowledged and said it was correcting. None of the recommendations require legislative action to implement the fee-related fixes; DSS can act on its own.
- DSS is paying a bill state law assigns to someone else. $1,790,802 in fingerprint-scan costs since August 2021, funded by federal grants the Legislative Audit Council found no requirement to use this way -- against a state statute that puts the cost on the child care worker or their employer.
- A related fee simply stopped, with no plan to restart it. DSS collected about $202,000 a year from Central Registry background-check fees for six years, then waived the fee in 2021-22 and has collected essentially nothing since -- and told auditors it has no plans to reinstate it, despite the audit's recommendation to do so immediately.
- The licensing pipeline itself misses its own target by a wide margin. The law's 90-day response window for provisional licensure is dwarfed by a 243-day median wait for a regular license in the audit's sample, with one provider waiting 878 days -- and providers separately say the length of the background-check process specifically costs them staff and qualified applicants.
Figures in this piece trace to the South Carolina Legislative Audit Council's June 2026 report, "A Limited Review of Licensing and Oversight of Child Care Providers by the S.C. Department of Social Services" (LAC/24-5), and to the South Carolina Code of Laws, Title 63, Chapter 13. The Legislative Audit Council is part of the state's legislative branch and organizationally independent of DSS, the executive-branch agency it examined; its findings rest on direct review of DSS financial transactions and a random sample of 50 provider licensing files, plus a survey of licensed providers. The $607,400 three-year foregone-revenue estimate is this publication's own extension of the report's six-year pre-waiver average fee revenue across three subsequent zero-revenue fiscal years -- an illustrative calculation, not a figure stated in the report itself.
Sources(2) ▾
- South Carolina Legislative Audit Council, A Limited Review of Licensing and Oversight of Child Care Providers by the S.C. Department of Social Services (LAC/24-5) (2026-06-01) — The Legislative Audit Council's full 100+ page performance audit of DSS's child care licensing operations, fetched and read in full (converted to text via pdftotext -layout for reliable page-level citation). Source for the $1,790,802 IDEMIA fingerprint-scan payment figure, the Central Registry check fee revenue-by-fiscal-year chart, the per-scan cost range, the accounting errors, the licensing-timeline data (provisional and regular license issuance times), the DSS background-investigation turnaround data, the IDEMIA contractor noncompliance findings, and Recommendations 1 through 9. A Wayback save-page-now request was made at read time and indexed within the hour. lac.sc.gov · original document
- South Carolina Legislature (Office of the Clerk / scstatehouse.gov), South Carolina Code of Laws, Title 63, Chapter 13 (Childcare Facilities) -- Sections 63-13-40, 63-13-100, 63-13-420 (2026-07-18) — The official codification of South Carolina's childcare-facility licensing statute, fetched to confirm the exact text of the background-check-fee assignment (63-13-40(D)(10)), the five-year/six-month background-check renewal rule (63-13-40(D)(6)), the 90-day licensure-determination deadline (63-13-420(D)), and the one-year cap on provisional license extensions (63-13-100(B)) that the LAC audit cites. A Wayback save-page-now request was made at read time and indexed within the hour. scstatehouse.gov · original document
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South Carolina's Department of Social Services has paid $1,790,802 since August 2021 to cover fingerprint-scan background checks for child care workers -- checks state law says the worker or the child care facility that employs them is supposed to pay for, not the state. The South Carolina Legislative Audit Council's June 2026 review states the finding without hedging: DSS is violating state law by covering the cost of fingerprint scans for child care provider staff.