New Jersey Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio answers questions after giving her report to the NJ Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee meeting on May 14, 2019. – AARON HOUSTON
The Murphy administration plans to roll out a website to track how the state’s lucrative tax breaks are bought and sold, citing a lack of transparency in the second-hand market.
“With more than 70 percent of tax credits transferred to date, the need for additional oversight and monitoring is critical,” State Treasurer Elizabeth Maher Muoio said in a Wednesday morning statement.
Most of the website will be an online database only viewable by the Economic Development Authority, – which oversees the incentives – the taxation division, and the entities that won the incentives.
The Treasury department’s announcement comes hours after a NorthJersey.com report detailing the extent of the ancillary market for Grow New Jersey tax breaks, wherein recipients sell the incentives to companies that are typically subject to a much weaker levy of scrutiny and transparency.
“While the Division of Taxation oversaw the first transfer of a tax credit from the original applicant to another entity, it could not track any subsequent transfers of that certificate until it was physically redeemed against another taxpayer’s liability,” the treasury statement reads.
Since the New Jersey Economic Opportunity Act of 2013, the state has awarded over $7 billion under the Grow NJ tax breaks used to incentivize corporations to set up shop in New Jersey or not leave the state.
Additionally, the EDA awarded nearly $4 billion during that same time frame for the Economic Redevelopment and Growth gap financing program, used for residential programs.
Both programs have now expired with no replacements. Murphy declined to sign a measure that would extend the two incentives for seven months to buy him and lawmakers more time to hash out a new set of incentives.
Lawmakers, in turn, have declined to move forward with approving Murphy’s proposed set of five economic incentives that would have replaced Grow NJ, capped at $400 million a year.
“I’m still hopeful we can find common ground sooner than later,” the governor said at an unrelated event Tuesday in Freehold.
“There’s a significant amount of lag when you’ve applied for something,” Murphy added. “So there’s not an immediate July 2 crisis. But we need to get on it sooner than later.”
