State to try to recover some misused tax breaks
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- July
- 17
The state is about to send out letters to companies that got tax breaks in exchange for a promise to create jobs – and then failed to do that – demanding they return the benefits, the state’s top economic-development official said today.
“We’re taking a ‘promises made, promises kept’ approach,’’ Pat Foye of the Empire State Development Corp. said at a forum on the state’s economy.
Foy wouldn’t say when the “clawback’’ letters will go out to the firms that got breaks through the state’s $500 million Empire Zones program, or how many are involved.
The program was plagued by charges of political favoritism under former Gov. George Pataki, with some firms using the “changing shirts’’ strategy. That meant merely changing the name of a company to look like new jobs were created, when in reality they weren’t.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 12:45 pm by Jay Gallagher.
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Jay Gallagher has covered Albany for Gannett News Service since 1984 and has been Albany Bureau chief since 1989. He`s a native of the Boston area and likes to point out that in this millennium, the score is Red Sox 1 championship, the Yankees 0. 
Cara Matthews has been a statehouse correspondent in the Albany Bureau since August 2005. Prior to that, she covered Putnam County government and politics at The Journal News for nearly five years. Before that, she worked at newspapers in Connecticut and covered the state Legislature for one of them. 
I understand the letters you reference have gone out.
How do we find out what firms received this letter?
The Empire State Development Corp. should make this information public.