Many of these companies want to hide their proposed jobs and wages on the initial application — it’s an extremely effective way of making it impossible to evaluate if these companies kept their promises to create high-paying jobs in exchange for taxpayer dollars.

Other states are also secretive about economic development. Amazon’s brazen public call for proposals for its second headquarters reveals how far governments will go to keep these secrets. Some cities and states revealed their bids, including New Jersey’s $7 billion taxpayer-funded incentive. But the majority didn’t. In January, when Amazon cut down this list down to 20 locations, the finalists signed nondisclosure agreements to keep the rest of the process secret.

Even the cities that were eliminated by Amazon have refused to make their bids public. Minnesota and Washington both have reputations for transparency and received “leading” rankings from the Pew Charitable Trusts in their evaluation of economic incentives. But Minneapolis and Tacoma, Wash., submitted their bids through nongovernment entities and claim they don’t even have access to the cities’ pitches to Amazon.

Another strategy to avoid transparency in a competition like this is through complexity. The idea is to make economic development so twisted that it’s nearly impossible to figure out who is responsible for it. If governments aren’t submitting these bids, with taxpayers’ money, who is responsible for economic development?

In many states, companies are wooed by getting a break on paying local taxes. In some of these cases, local interests get overlooked — in particular, schools. There are school districts where economic developers were empowered to give away the tax revenues without the input of educators. The California Teachers’ Association supported a law to help stop giving away their tax dollars. Louisiana just allowed school districts to modify or decline these incentives.

In Texas, rather than cutting school districts out of the process, the rules were written to make sure districts always say yes to company incentive requests. Our program, called Chapter 313, allows a school district to forgive a company’s taxes, but the state pays the taxes to the school district. Even better, schools can request “supplemental payments” from companies, which in some cases exceed 40 percent of the company’s incentive benefits. Ironically, school districts make more money from companies that accept a tax incentive than a company that comes with no government support. As you can guess, in these cases, school districts say yes to every request, companies receive tax incentives, and Texas taxpayers are on the hook for billions of dollars.