After the ×îÐÂÐÓ°ÉÔ´´ County Council approved tax breaks for Boeing in September 2023, the Post-Dispatch began collecting data about the company’s performance under prior incentive deals with Missouri.
Some of the data for the 2014 Missouri Works deal is available online, such as through the , which tracks tax incentives, and the . Government accountability groups such as Washington, D.C.-based publicly share information.
But much of the data needed to track how much Boeing received in tax breaks, and how they performed with job growth, is not readily available.
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To find the data, the Post-Dispatch submitted more than a dozen open records requests to the Missouri Department of Economic Development over the course of a year.
Initially, the department provided annual verification reports submitted by Boeing along with agreements between the company and the state.
The agreements outline how the state calculates the incentives. For qualifying jobs Boeing retains in the region, the company gets to pocket a percentage of income taxes withheld from those employees’ paychecks. The more retained jobs, the bigger the percentage. Every year since the program began, the company has kept 15.9% of withheld taxes. For new jobs, Boeing gets to keep 7% of the total new-job payroll.
But the annual verification forms lacked detailed information about job numbers and payroll — both key to calculating Boeing’s tax incentives and performance. And the company in some years submitted the wrong verification report form.
The Post-Dispatch submitted more detailed records requests. The state provided portions of spreadsheets Boeing submits each year that include the number of retained jobs, number of new jobs, payroll and tax withheld. Some of the records were closed because they contain confidential employee information.
The new data showed how the state calculated taxes and revealed exactly how Boeing had performed since it inked the deal a decade ago.
