Theft is not random. It concentrates wherever the watching stops. Strong oversight — counting what comes in, tracking what goes out, and reconciling the two on a schedule — does more than catch wrongdoing after the fact; it deters it before it starts, because would-be thieves know the gap between taking something and being noticed is short. Remove that watching, and the same gap stretches wide enough to drive thousands of dollars through. North Myrtle Beach is now living the lesson. Police have charged a 30-year-old Conway man, Carlton Michael Simmons, with embezzlement of public funds, alleging he collected more than $30,000 by stealing city-owned cell phones and laptops and reselling them [The Sun News, 2026]. The case is one charge against one person, but the conditions that let an alleged scheme of that size accumulate are the real story.
A loss that size doesn’t happen quickly — or in plain sight
Simmons has been charged, not convicted, and is owed the presumption of innocence as the case moves through the courts. But set the individual aside and look at the mechanics the allegation describes, because they are what should worry residents. More than $30,000 in phones and laptops does not vanish in a single afternoon. A loss of that magnitude builds over time, item by item, in a setting where no one is reconciling inventory often enough to notice the shrinkage. That is the signature of thin oversight: not a dramatic break-in, but a slow bleed that no routine check ever stops. The equipment was the city’s. The system meant to account for it is what allegedly failed.
Oversight is the thing that makes theft hard
Every functioning organization defends itself against this with the same unglamorous tools. Assets get tagged and logged. Custody is recorded, so there is always an answer to “who has this device.” Records are reconciled on a regular cadence, so a missing item surfaces in weeks, not years. Purchasing and disposal are separated from the people who handle the hardware, so no single employee both controls equipment and decides where it goes. None of this is exotic; it is the basic plumbing of public accountability. Its entire purpose is to make theft difficult to commit and easy to detect. When those controls are strong, an attempt to siphon $30,000 in equipment trips an alarm early. When they are weak or absent, the same attempt looks, for a long time, like nothing at all. The amount alleged here is itself evidence of how much room there was to operate.
North Myrtle Beach’s watching has been running thin
That matters because North Myrtle Beach has been openly struggling with exactly the kind of oversight that prevents this. By the city’s own account, its finance operations were antiquated and still largely paper-based, with turnover in the finance director’s post during the same period [MyHorryNews, 2025]. The city’s 2024 audit was completed late and required corrections, its 2025 audit remains unfinished, and it currently holds no bond rating [MyrtleBeachSC News, 2026]. An audit is not a formality; it is the annual, independent check on whether the books reflect reality — the highest-level form of the same watching that asset tracking performs at the ground level. When the audits fall behind and the records run on paper, the city’s ability to notice that something is missing weakens at every tier. The city’s information technology operations — the function responsible for the kind of equipment at issue in this case — fall under the Department of Information Services, led by Director of Information Services Rob Foor [City of North Myrtle Beach Directory, 2026]. Residents sensed the gap before this case surfaced: at a June budget hearing, two of them asked the city to commission a forensic audit, a request the city manager declined [MyHorryNews, 2026]. The embezzlement charge that followed is a concrete illustration of why that instinct toward more scrutiny, not less, was sound.
The bottom line
The lesson of this case is not that one employee allegedly stole — it is that the conditions in North Myrtle Beach made an alleged theft of this size possible to sustain. Theft moves into the spaces oversight abandons, and the city has left too many of those spaces open. Residents do not need to wait for the verdict to draw the practical conclusion. Until the audits are finished and the watching is restored, the question is not whether a gap exists, but what slips through it next.
Further Reading
- North Myrtle Beach worker accused of selling city-owned phones — The Sun News
- Why North Myrtle Beach May Have to Wait to Borrow — MyrtleBeachSC News
- North Myrtle Beach gives first reading approval to $190M budget — MyHorryNews
- North Myrtle Beach adopts FY 2027 budget with property tax hike — WPDE ABC15
- Horry County Sheriff’s Office — Bookings & Releases
- City of North Myrtle Beach — official site
