Gail M. Sanders, comptroller of the Miss South Carolina contest, declined to discuss Ms. Wood’s case but said, “To my knowledge there is not a single contestant in the state of South Carolina who has abided by the rules who has not been paid.”

Image Ms. Wood said Miss America scholarship winners encounter one obstacle after another. Credit... Clay Spann

Carrie Davis Cousar, Miss South Carolina 1992, sued the pageant and settled a short time later; the terms were not disclosed. Last year, the South Carolina secretary of state investigated the Miss South Carolina competition and fined it $2,000 in March for not having its financial papers in order.

Pageant organizers and contestants at the local and state levels describe a system plagued by weak oversight and run largely by 100,000 volunteers. The local competitions, franchised by the 52 state pageants, have no legal ties to the national organization, though they feed contestants into the national pageant, which moved to Las Vegas from Atlantic City last year and will be broadcast on the TLC cable channel in January. And the local pageants vary in how well they are administered, contestants and administrators say.

Safiya Songhai, Miss Five Boroughs of New York in 2004, said she struggled to get the $1,000 scholarship she won. “I had been warned by a girl who won before me that I’m not going to see that money,” said Ms. Songhai, who said that in contrast, she had no problem collecting $5,000 as a runner-up to Miss District of Columbia in 2001 and 2003.

She filed and won a case by default in small claims court in Manhattan after the director of the Miss Five Boroughs Scholarship Pageant failed to respond to messages left over five months. When she still had not received her scholarship, she took her story to a local television station. She was paid within two days of the broadcast of her account, she said. The organizer of the now-disbanded pageant did not return calls for comment.

“Basically, if I hadn’t gone after them, I wouldn’t have gotten my money,” Ms. Songhai said. “There is no real checks and balances to make sure the contestants get their money.” She said that competing in Miss Five Boroughs was fun, but added, “They are disorganized and they are bad with money management.”