Visualizing Oklahoma income tax credits
With the budget deficit, state lawmakers are taking another look at the wisdom of granting tax credits to various industries. Our Capitol reporters have several stories on the subject in today’s paper:
- Oklahoma House panel wants tax credits more transparent
- Oklahoma lawmakers discuss ending tax credits for small business venture capital companies
The state provides some information on who has claimed income tax credits on a section of its Open Books site. It’s a fairly good presentation, but it doesn’t allow you to download the raw data or do any kind of aggregation. I contacted the Office of State Finance to get some of the raw data provided to them by the Oklahoma Tax Commission. You can download it yourself here.
For 2007 and 2008, at least $256 million in Oklahoma income tax credits were claimed, according to the data. In the meantime, here’s a quick look at what types of income tax credits are being claimed.
Some words of caution: Some of the numbers in the data provided by the Office of State Finance and Oklahoma Tax Commission do not reflect what’s in today’s stories. That’s partly because claimants can carry forward unused credits for some credits to use against their tax liabilities in future years. Also, as the stories make clear, tracking the tax credits is murky at best. This data shows just income tax credits claimed, not credits claimed against gross production taxes or insurance premium taxes. More on that here.
–Paul
(Full disclosure: My employer, The Oklahoma Publishing Co & Subs, shows up several times in the data for various income tax credits for a total of $366,000 in 2007 and 2008.)
Written by Paul Monies
Follow @pmonies
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[...] 3422 also peels back some of the secrecy surrounding the state’s tax credits. It expands the information collected on the claimants and brokers of income tax credits: HB3422 [...]