Posted on: Monday, September 6, 2004

EDITORIAL
Tax-break estimates must be made public

The state Council on Revenues makes tax-revenue projections that are used to create the state budget.

These projections are best-guess estimates based upon the best figures available at the time they are made. No one expects them to be perfect, and they rarely are.

We've heard people take issue with some of these projections, but we've never heard the economists who make them ridiculed in public. Nor have we heard much from them lately asking to keep their work secret.

Yet fear of ridicule is one of the reasons advanced by the state Office of Information Practices for its opinion that the Tax Department should be permitted to keep secret its estimates of the effect of tax credits on revenues.

The tax credit estimates are among the many ingredients that the Council of Revenues cranks into its revenue projections. We'd suggest the folks at the Tax Department need to learn to bite the bullet like the folks at the council do. They are public servants, after all.

The Tax Department admits that it's not happy with the veracity of its tax credit estimates. That may be because it has been less than rigorous and compulsory about gathering the data that go into its estimates.

Firms that benefit from tax credits should not be left to feel that submitting that needed data is voluntary. It is only the information in its aggregate form that is sent on to the Council of Revenues, not numbers from individual companies.

Which is why making those estimates public is not hurtful to business, but helpful to it. Transparency in government is a pro-business philosophy.

Bottom line, if your job is to hand out estimates that will affect how much state money is budgeted for vital services like healthcare and education, you'd better have a certain amount of confidence in your product or you're in the wrong line of work.