Good Jobs First Blog

A new Good Jobs First report finds that many large corporations operating in the United States have boosted their profits by forcing employees to work off the clock, cheating them out of required overtime pay and engaging in similar practices that together are known as wage theft.

In a recent update of its Implementation Guide, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) defied the recommendations of many commenters and ruled that most tax increment financing (TIF) spending will remain undisclosed.

The ruling is a major blow to GASB’s Statement 77 on Tax Abatement Disclosures, the new rule that

Washington, DC—As Amazon.com conducts site visits at the 20 finalist locations for its second headquarters, or HQ2 project, little is known about most of those localities’ first-round bids, and almost nothing at all is known about six. Even though billions of dollars are at stake, few states and cities have fully disclosed their bids. Even those that have partially disclosed have not revealed the details of their tax-break offers and their costs to taxpayers.

In response to many inquiries we have received since releasing our study, Will Amazon Fool Us Twice?, about aggressive subsidy-gathering behavior by the online retail giant (and to mark Amazon's made-up "Prime Day"), Good Jobs First issued a WARN Act tip for reporters on how to add additional context to Amazon.com's claim of "creating" 100,000 jobs.

As states and localities finally start to disclose how much revenue they lose to corporate welfare (thanks to GASB Statement 77*), we continue to see laggards and leaders.

Today we spotlight Georgia (which has failed to comply, claiming taxpayer confidentiality for numbers that have long been public) and Bernalillo