Well, whaddya know? One day after I reported that the Georgia Department of Revenue (DOR) hadn’t responded to my questions about the state’s Job Tax Credit (JTC) program, I got some answers. They weren’t very good answers, but — what can I say? — we lowly bloggers have to take what we can get.

My central question was simple: why was DOR ditching 35 years of county-level Job Tax Credit reporting and replacing it with state-level totals that provide almost no useful information?

DOR’s explanation was a little complicated — at least for me — and involved IRS-style suppression rules and state law requiring the agency to keep our tax filings confidential.

But what it boiled down to is this: after decades of happily providing county-level data, DOR now says it’s barred from even acknowledging that any JTC claims were filed in any Georgia county where fewer than 10 businesses claimed the credit. In other words, in DOR’s telling every county-by-credit-by-year combination is its own little data bucket, and at least 10 taxpayers have to be in that bucket before DOR will show it.  (Note to DOR: If I don’t have that right, you know where to reach me.)

Based on my review of the JTC reports DOR sent me back in early April, that basically eliminates all but a handful of counties. Without that apparently accidental disclosure, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that:

• In 2023, a Fulton County business claimed $163,789,750 in job tax credits for the creation of 34,049 “quality” jobs.
• From 2022 through 2025, one or more businesses in Glynn County claimed $37.1 million in job tax credits for the creation of 3,744 “quality” jobs — a tax credit of nearly $10,000 per job.
• A Bacon County business in 2023 took a $47,000 tax credit for apparently eliminating 27 jobs.
• Over that same four-year period, businesses scattered across more than 100 mostly non-coastal counties claimed nearly $150 million in “port activity” bonuses.
• Of the total $2.84 billion in job tax credits claimed over the 2022-2025 period, $2.55 billion went to companies filing claims of at least $1 million each.
• Over the same four-year period, only 28 counties didn’t have a single business that filed JTC claims, most of them the small, economically distressed counties the program was designed to help in the first place.

Now, of course, DOR says the data in the first batch of reports is incorrect. Faithful readers of Trouble in God’s Country may remember that I wondered whether claims like the ones I listed above could be correct and submitted a handful of questions to DOR asking as much. They might also recall that DOR responded with a somewhat cryptic — at least to me — statement that the initial reports were flawed and that they were working to correct them.

The correction process took DOR nearly two months and produced a significant reduction, for the years 2022 through 2025, in both the number of JTC-supported jobs and the overall credits being claimed. The numbers were still substantial: job tax credits over that four-year period fell from $2.84 billion to $1.15 billion, and JTC-supported jobs dropped from about 915,000 to roughly 337,000.

But the real problem was that the new reports completely eliminated any reference to the county-specific entries DOR has put out for the past 30-plus years. It wasn’t that, for example, DOR’s data crunchers decided the aforementioned Fulton County business had really claimed only $145 million in 2023 credits for, say, 27,000 jobs. They just erased the whole line altogether.

In the questions I emailed to DOR, I pointed out that no taxpayer had ever complained about the old reports — a fact DOR itself had previously acknowledged. I then asked: “What led the Department to decide — now — to adopt the IRS-style ‘fewer than 10 taxpayers’ suppression rule for JTC reporting?”

Joe Snowden, the department’s Director of External Affairs and Communications, answered thusly:

“Whether or not a taxpayer has complained is irrelevant to the analysis. The aggregation standard is not new, but the Department has renewed its focus on ensuring that public reporting aligns with tax confidentiality requirements. While we understand this may feel like a reduction in transparency, the Department cannot release data that does not comply with O.C.G.A. § 48-7-60(a).”

A little history helps explain how we got here. When the JTC was established in 1990, two state agencies were given responsibility for different ends of the program. The Department of Community Affairs (DCA) was charged with ranking Georgia’s 159 counties based on three economic measures, determining which ones were eligible for JTC-supported jobs, and handling the front-end paperwork. DOR, of course, had responsibility for processing tax filings and, explicitly, for producing annual reports on the program.

The original program rule produced by DCA held as follows:

Report Issued Annually by the State Revenue Commissioner. Each year, the state revenue commissioner will issue a report on the job tax credit program. Included in the report will be information, by county/census tract area, by year, on the number of jobs created through the job tax credit and the amount of the tax credit used by all business enterprises.

But that rule disappeared in 2020 when DCA edited the program rules and quietly dropped the reporting requirement. I emailed the DCA program manager, Tricia DePadro, and asked why the change was made. Her answer was that DCA didn’t think it was appropriate for one agency to write reporting rules for another, and that in any event the requirement “existed” in state law. She even provided the statutory language:

GA Code § 48-7-40(k): “The commissioner may require such reports, promulgate such regulations, and gather such relevant data necessary and advisable for the evaluation of the job tax credits established by this Code section.”

I’m not a lawyer, but I read that language a bit differently from the old DCA rule. It authorizes the commissioner to collect the job creation and tax credit information, but it stops short of saying he has to make that information public or issue an annual report.

Even so, for the next five years, DOR kept on producing exactly the same kind of reports it had for the previous 30 years — right up until I submitted my questions and the department was suddenly seized with a newfound commitment to protect the identities of Georgia businesses that were pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in tax credits.

This may be a good place to leave this story for now, but it’s worth recapping what changed and what didn’t. The confidentiality statute didn’t suddenly get stricter; it has always allowed the Department to publish statistics so long as they don’t identify individual returns. What changed was that DCA quietly dropped the rule that required DOR to issue county‑level reports. What DOR did with that freedom was its own choice: it traded county‑level sunlight for statewide fog.

Stay tuned. I still have more loose ends to tie up and rabbit holes to go down.

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