At the end of my recent post on Georgia’s Job Tax Credit program, I asked readers to stay tuned, that there was more to come. The story was one that spawned a multitude of loose ends that I had to leave on the cutting room floor.  This piece is about one of those loose ends, albeit a very big one: the simple question of who, if anyone, is making sure this thing works.

So I asked. And the first clear answer I got came from the person who manages the program at the Department of Community Affairs (DCA). The entire reply, verbatim: “There is no oversight process.”

Before we get into the oversight void, it’s worth noting just how big the Job Tax Credit (JTC) program has become. I now have JTC reports from 2009 forward (except for one missing year, 2011). In 2009, businesses claimed about $24.4 million in job tax credits for the creation of 4,409 jobs. From there through 2016, the annual total bounced around — up one year, down the next — and landed at $53.4 million for 20,017.

Then it exploded. In 2017, JTC claims jumped to $225.7 million and kept climbing, with a brief COVID‑era pause in 2020 and 2021. In the first batch of reports the Department of Revenue (DOR) sent me earlier this year, the program peaked at $929.6 million in 2023. The revised, “corrected” reports they sent me a few weeks later knocked those numbers a good bit, but they still show a staggering increase in the past few years.

You’ll see that arc in the column chart I’ve included below — jobs and dollars, side by side, from 2009 through 2024, based on reports provided by DOR — but the basic story is simple: a program that quietly handed out a few dozen million dollars a year at the beginning of this period is now shaving something close to a half-billion dollars off Georgia companies’ tax bills every year, all in the name of “job creation.”

Maybe I’m naïve, but I figured that somewhere along the way, as the program ballooned from tens of millions to several hundred million, it might have occurred to somebody to build a proper set of brakes and gauges.  I would have been wrong.

As it turns out, though, I’m not the only one to ask that question.  A 2006 performance audit by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts of corporate income tax credits, including the Job Tax Credit, concluded that the Department of Revenue “cannot ensure that the credits have been accurately and consistently earned and used” because it relies heavily on taxpayer self‑certifications, has limited documentation requirements, and audits only a small fraction of credits.

Three years later, a 2009 follow‑up review by the same office found that “no steps have been taken to begin collecting data for evaluating the costs and benefits” of corporate tax credits, despite the 2006 recommendation that Georgia start doing just that. In that follow‑up, the auditor noted that the state had forgone roughly $644 million in corporate tax credits from 1999 through 2007 — without building the data systems needed to assess whether those tax expenditures were paying off.

The 2009 report did give DOR some credit for procedural improvements: an audit procedures manual for corporate tax credits, checklists for documentation, some training for auditors, and plans for an Integrated Tax System that would consolidate tax‑credit administration. But on the big questions — collecting program‑level data, requiring supporting documentation up front, and building a quality‑assurance process for approvals and denials — the verdict was blunt: “Not Implemented.” DOR continued to argue that requiring documentation when businesses claim credits was not its job and that any decision to collect and analyze tax‑credit data was a “policy decision for the General Assembly’s consideration.”

Fast‑forward to 2022, and the Department of Audits and Accounts is still worrying aloud about whether the JTC program actually works. A tax‑incentive evaluation of JTC found that the state does not collect the data it would need to know whether the credit is truly producing net new jobs and better outcomes in the counties it is supposed to help, and that credits have been granted without clear evidence of cost‑effectiveness.

Instead of tightening oversight and finally building the data needed to answer those questions, the Department of Revenue has gone in a very different direction: it has made the program less transparent than ever.

For roughly 35 years, DOR produced JTC reports showing, by county and by credit type, the number of jobs claimed and the amount of credit used. As I reported in my last post, that changed recently, after I asked for the latest JTC reports and submitted a handful of questions about seemingly odd JTC claims.  DOR discovered “errors” in its data and then replaced 129 pages of detailed, county‑specific entries with four 10‑line statewide summary tables. The new reports aggregate every single JTC claim into statewide totals and strip out all county‑ and credit‑level detail.

In the course of that exchange, I sent Amy Bushyeager, the DOR attorney who oversees the agency’s public information office, several questions, including this one: Other than routine tax audits, does DOR perform any oversight of the JTC program or JTC claims?  Anything to ensure that the jobs being claimed have actually been created and maintained as required under the law?  

I’ve received no answer. For a department that now insists it cannot let the public see even county‑level JTC statistics, that silence speaks volumes – especially in combination with DCA’s “no oversight” acknowledgement.

Bottom line: Georgia now probably has the least transparent job‑tax‑credit program in the nation — a program that has quietly grown from a few dozen million dollars a year to hundreds of millions — administered by a Revenue department that hides basic statistics and a Community Affairs department that freely admits “there is no oversight process.”

If this were a direct spending program, say a half‑billion‑dollar grant line for “job creation,” lawmakers would expect annual reports, performance measures, county‑level breakdowns, and at least some assurance that the jobs being paid for actually exist.

Because the Job Tax Credit operates inside the tax code, those expectations seem to vanish. The dollars have exploded, the data has disappeared, and there is no visible oversight.  As a result, taxpayers have no way of knowing how much of their state’s so‑called job‑creation money is actually landing in their communities. 

Stay tuned. I’ve still got a few more JTC loose ends to tie up — and a few rabbit holes to go down — before this story is done.

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