Ohio-based Diebold Corporation announced yesterday that in the coming weeks it will begin moving nearly 200 Ohio jobs to India.

You may recall hearing Diebold in the headlines exactly one year ago.

On April 12, 2011, John Kasich proudly announced that he had struck a deal to keep the company in Ohio in which the company accepted a package of state and local incentives totaling $100 million, including $56 million from the State.

The State’s agreement, outlined in the May 23, 2011 minutes of the Ohio Tax Credit Authority, grants Diebold up to $2 million per year over 15 years in state tax credits, “in exchange for a commitment from Diebold, Inc. to retain 1,500 full-time equivalent employees.”

At the time, Diebold boasted 1,900 Ohio employees. Kasich’s agreement actually allowed them to eliminate 400 jobs in exchange for receiving the ironically-named Job Retention Tax Credit. Kasich then went on to frequently tout the Diebold deal as one of his biggest job-saving accomplishments.

According to the Beacon Journal, Diebold currently employs between 1,700 and 1,800 Ohio workers. Today’s announcement that approximately 200 of those jobs will be eliminated means that the company will be left with somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 workers in Ohio. That is dangerously close to violating the terms of the company’s agreement to maintain 1,500 workers in exchange for the tax credit.

Just think: Diebold was given 15 years to eliminate 400 jobs and they did it in just one! That’s efficiency.

Was it the company’s intention all along to eliminate these jobs when it inked the deal? We may never know.

Did the company play Ohio officials for suckers, getting taxpayers to build its new headquarters by pretending to consider a move to North Carolina and killing 400 jobs in the process? Looks like it.

We’ve said it before and we’re pretty sure we’ll say it again: John Kasich is a terrible negotiator. He gave Diebold $20 million more than North Carolina was willing to offer when they weren’t ever actually going to leave and allowed them to cut 400 workers from the payroll in the process. All in exchange for $56 million from the taxpayers.

Now Diebold has made good on its promise and will soon have 400 fewer employees than it did when Kasich touted the “job-saving” deal. The company downplays the job reductions, saying that, even with the cuts, it “expects it will have overall higher employment once it moves into the new site.”

Which is funny because it’s not at all what they said in a January press release:

Diebold’s new corporate campus will house about 1,500 of the company’s employees in its global headquarters.

In case you weren’t reading closely, that’s fewer jobs than today, not more.

But rest assured, readers, the company says it will still get the money:

The job losses will not impact public incentive packages related to Diebold’s plans to move into a new $100 million headquarters in Green, Jacobsen said.

Fool us once, get $56 million. Fool us twice, keep the $56 million. Everyone wins!