This is the story of a 35-year-old program that was built to help Georgia’s poorest rural counties but has now morphed into a nearly impenetrable bureaucratic black box that – at the risk of being a little uncharitable – arguably functions as our state government’s very own political dark money machine.

The program is the state’s Job Tax Credit (JTC) program.  It was created in the early 1990s for the purpose of steering jobs to the state’s most economically distressed counties by granting tax credits to companies willing to create jobs in those counties.  Over time, it’s been expanded to the point that certain types of jobs now qualify for tax credits in nearly every county in the state.

Since the dawn of the JTC program, the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) has compiled annual reports listing, without identifying individual taxpayers, each JTC-related claim, including the number of jobs being created and the amount of the tax credit being claimed. 

Back at the end of March, I sent DOR an open records request seeking the JTC reports for the years 2022 through 2025.  At the time, I wasn’t planning to write a blog post; instead, I was gathering data to update a section in my forthcoming book (“Trouble in God’s Country, Volume I” – coming any decade now to a bookstore near you). 

But then I got the four reports and almost immediately had questions about some of the entries.  Like the Glynn County business that got $9.9 million in tax credits for the creation of 14 “quality” jobs.  Or the Fulton County business that claimed $163.8 million in tax credits for the creation of more than 34,000 jobs.  Or the businesses in Appling, Burke, Chattooga, Dodge, Hart, Henry, McDuffie, Thomas and Tift counties that received a combined total of $11.3 million for creating 0 – that’s right, zero – jobs.  Better yet, perhaps, the Bacon County business that got a $47,000 tax break for apparently eliminating 27 jobs. 

These have to be mistakes, I thought, and sent DOR a list of questions asking for confirmation or clarification.  A few hours later, I got a response from Ms. Amy Bushyeager, who identified herself as the attorney in charge of public information at DOR.  It’s almost never a good sign when a request for public information is answered by an attorney, or, for that matter, when an attorney is in charge of an agency’s public information department.

But Ms. Bushyeager’s response was encouraging.  She said she was working to identify “subject matter experts” who could answer my questions.  And she added: “In the meantime, please note that the error found in the r2014 report likely impacted the job tax credit data you were provided in 2023.  The modified report is now in user testing.  We’ll rerun TY2022 along with the 2025 data.” 

That was a little puzzling.  I hadn’t realized there was an “error” in that report, but it turned out that my questions led to the discovery that the data DOR had provided me – including old reports going back more than a decade – was incorrect.  Several weeks of delays followed as DOR apparently reworked its reports.  I waited patiently, figuring I would get the same kinds of reports I had been getting for a good number of years.

Silly me.

The first batch of reports DOR provided ran a combined total of 129 pages and listed just over 1,700 county-specific entries.  The second consisted of 10-line extracts from DOR spreadsheets that showed only the number of jobs created and tax credits awarded by the type of job recognized under the JTC program.  Here’s the one for 2022:

The big difference in the two sets of reports: the first batch DOR sent me showed $2.84 billion in tax credits for roughly 915,000 jobs over the four-year period from 2022 through 2025.  The revised reports cut the total in tax credits down to $2.4 billion in tax credits for just over 740,000 jobs – and, of course, completely eliminated any reference to the specific county-by-county entries included in the first group of reports.   

The tax credits aren’t checks, of course, but they are tax expenditures – foregone revenue that can’t be used for schools, healthcare, or anything else.

The reason for the reporting changes, Ms. Bushyeager said, was to protect the identities of the businesses receiving the job tax credits – as required, she said, by Georgia law.  Her specific explanation:

“The job tax credit reports previously provided have not adhered to the aggregation threshold the Department uses to protect taxpayer confidentiality.  Based on IRS practices, the Department will not release data if it is culled from the tax returns of fewer than 10 taxpayers.  To address this issue, the Department has aggregated the data pertaining to each tax credit.  Where a credit type cannot be aggregated, the credit name has been removed.  The Department understands this change reduces the utility of the reports, but the law prohibits the Department from releasing data that could be used to identify specific taxpayers.  This duty extends to the publication of statistical data and reports.”

How the information in the original reports could have been used to identify individual taxpayers is unclear, at least to me.  What is clear is that the change pretty much makes it impossible to evaluate the extent to which the JTC achieves its original objective of steering jobs to the state’s poorest counties, which was my reason for wanting the county-level data.

Also clear is that Georgia now probably has the least transparent job tax credit program in the nation.  In a 2022 report, Good Jobs First, a nonprofit organization that promotes transparency in economic development incentives, rated Alabama and Georgia dead last with perfect scores of 0.0, including goose eggs for their JTC programs. 

In 2023, though, Alabama enacted a new “Transparency in Incentives Act” requiring the publication, online, of key information about economic development incentives granted to businesses, including their identities.  So, while Alabama has probably nudged its transparency score above zero, Georgia may now be at a sub-zero level and will almost certainly have last place all to itself when the next Good Jobs First report comes out.  

All of which brings me back to the aforementioned bureaucratic black box and my unkind supposition that it could be functioning, as a practical matter, as the state’s very own dark money machine. 

Whatever do I mean by that?

Simply put, the same corporations that benefit from the job tax credits are free to write campaign checks to the lawmakers who keep the subsidies flowing, and while those donations are a matter of public record, the underlying tax breaks are not (or at least won’t be going forward; yes, I’ve got a lot of the old reports, but now DOR is telling they’re “flawed”). 

So, bottom line, Georgia’s taxpayers can see money coming back into politics, but not public dollars that went out through the tax code and that could, theoretically, be subsidizing those political contributions. No one has to break a law for it to work this way, but the state has effectively built a tax‑code patronage machine: corporate beneficiaries show up plainly on campaign‑finance reports, while the subsidies that may be helping to underwrite their giving are hidden from the people paying the bill.

Stay tuned.  There’s more to come.