WHEN GOV. Mark Sanford came up with a way to get the state’s campaign finance data on the Internet in time for next year’s elections, he also shed light on a little-noticed venture into electronic government that South Carolina has been working on for nearly two years.

Last summer, the state Budget and Control Board awarded South Carolina Interactive a contract to produce interactive Internet portals for state agencies. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of NIC USA (nicusa.com), which has been in the e-government business since 1991 and has contracts with 17 states. Budget and Control Board spokesman Michael Sponhour describes NIC as “the big dogs in e-government.” Unlike other companies that bid on the contract, NIC offered to provide its services at no charge to the state, through what it calls a “self-funded” system.

“The beauty of it is it requires no appropriated dollars from the state,” says Jeff McCartney, general manager of S.C. Interactive. “We make our money off transaction, or convenience, fees, usually targeted on selected transactions that are commercially viable. We’re targeting the information that businesses need and want, but they don’t want to stand in line or mail it in. They’d rather do it online and they pay a small fee.”

NIC typically manages a state’s Web site and builds applications that the government requests; on average, Mr. McCartney told me, about 80 percent of the applications it builds are free to all users. The campaign finance database will fall into that “free” category — no charge to the public or to the candidates who use it.

That’s about all we know about the campaign database at this point, though. Mr. McCartney says that since Mr. Sanford’s announcement, he has had one conversation with Ethics Commission staff and is confident he can have a short-term solution in place by January that will allow the public to search campaign records to find out where candidates are getting their money.

That system likely will involve candidates using their own software and providing their campaign reports through an import-export system. Long-term, he said, the state needs a system that allows candidates to enter their reports directly into an online Ethics Commission form. But it will be up to the Ethics Commission to decide whether S.C. Interactive provides that long-term solution or not.

That’s typical of the way the company will work with the state, Mr. Sponhour says; it’s up to the company to convince state agencies to sign up for the service. The company, he said, has to “go knock on the doors of agencies and say ‘You do this and that service; we can do that through this e-service.’ No agency has to use this company. No service has to go online.”

State agencies benefit because they save the time and money it would take to design and operate their own Web sites and online program, Mr. McCartney says. And at least in theory, putting more services online reduces costs for agencies. One reason S.C. Interactive can provide most of its applications without a fee is that it is able to modify applications it has written for other states, rather than starting from scratch.

But signing up an agency is just the first step in the project. Once agencies decide they want to work with S.C. Interactive to create or redesign online programs, they take the proposal to an e-government management committee that decides which projects the company will pursue and the order in which it will pursue them as well as whether any fees the company is proposing are reasonable.

S.C. Interactive has already finished its first project — a fee-based service that allows insurance companies and attorneys to get driver’s license information online. It’s now working on a redesign of the state’s main Web site, myscgov.com, and taking over a payment engine that is no longer being supported by the current vendor. Several state agencies use the engine to process credit card payments online.

The new myscgov.com portal is mainly a redesign, but S.C. Interactive also will offer some new services, including live help, which is akin to an online chat or instant messaging, that allows people to ask questions about how an application works or where to find a particular type of information on the site. The site also will have an enhanced search engine.

Of course this raises the question of which services it’s appropriate for government to charge for, and which should be considered a part of government, already funded by taxes. It will be up to the e-government management committee, which is chaired by deputy state Chief Information Officer Barbara Teusink and is made up of appointees from several state agencies, local government and industry, to make sure that question is answered appropriately.

Mr. McCartney says his company probably won’t get involved with an agency such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, which already has spent tens of millions of tax dollars redesigning its computer and Web services, and is providing services online at no charge. “What we want to do is go out and work with agencies that have services they’d like to bring online,” he said. “Or in some instances there are agencies that do not even have a Web site. We’d like to help create one and then see if there’s additional services we could provide” for a fee.

It’s an arrangement that South Carolina could benefit from tremendously — as long as we keep an eye on things and make sure the right calls are made about which services cost extra and which are available as standard government services.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.