A loan servicing company that once promised more than 1,600 Oregon jobs in exchange for a $900,000 public subsidy now says it will close its Beaverton site and lay off the remaining workers.

State documents indicate the company never hit hiring commitments established in 2010 and that state and local governments recovered only a portion of the public funding used to lure the business.

Texas-based Mr. Cooper Group acknowledged the pending closure Tuesday in a statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive, drawing on a well of corporate doublespeak to explain its decision.

“Mr. Cooper Group continuously looks for ways to further increase efficiencies that best meet the needs of our team members, customers and shareholders and ensures the long term success of the business,” the company wrote. “After careful consideration of all our options and strategic priorities, we made the decision to close the Beaverton, Oregon location.”

Cooper Group didn’t say how many employees remain at the site and did not respond to a question seeking additional information. The company said it will offer a stipend to employees who relocate to one of Cooper Group’s sites in Texas.

The Beaverton operation has operated under several names. Wilshire Credit Corp. sold its loan servicing business to IBM, which later renamed that portion of company Seterus. Cooper Group purchased the Seterus business from IBM last year.

A Seterus call center in Salem closed in 2018. Its 200 employees were given the option to move to the Beaverton site that will now also close, according to a Salem Statesman Journal report.

In the throes of the Great Recession, Oregon economic development officials worked in 2010 to persuade the business to expand here rather than move the jobs to North Carolina or Oklahoma. Sites in Beaverton and Salem employed 710 at the time but IBM indicated they could grow to 1,600 in exchange for state support.

So Oregon offered a nearly $900,000 package through four funding sources:

$550,000 from Salem Workforce Partners

$49,500 from the City of Beaverton

$200,000 from the governor’s “Strategic Training Fund”

$100,000 from a state Strategic Reserve Fund

The $100,000 in state money was tied to a promise that IBM would add 600 Oregon jobs by the summer of 2014.

After a pair of layoffs at the Beaverton site, state officials told The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2015 they could not tell if the site had met the 2014 job creation target required by its subsidies. The following year, in 2016, officials concluded IBM had hired just 351 of the 600 required employees.

So Business Oregon, the state’s economic development agency, reclaimed $41,500 from the original subsidy, plus $13,700 in interest, according to documents provided by the agency.

It’s not clear whether the other subsidies had clawback provisions and officials in Salem and Beaverton said Wednesday they were not immediately able to ascertain what rules applied to the incentives when IBM collected the money in 2010.

The IBM/Seterus subsidy was relatively small by Oregon standards.

Local governments provide hundreds of millions of dollars annually in tax exemptions to large companies, primarily Intel, Amazon, Google and Apple.

Most of those dollars don’t come with job guarantees – but they also don’t take money directly from public coffers. Instead, they exempt a company from property taxes on new projects or capital investment. That means companies don’t save anything unless they spend money on a project that would otherwise be taxable.

The funding for the IBM/Seterus deal, by contrast, were straight-up government subsidies.

Tax watchdogs have campaigned for more oversight of Oregon tax breaks, seeking a cap on the value of incentives per job created, limits on the number of tax breaks a project can receive, and a regular review of all incentive programs. The proposals have made no headway in recent legislative sessions.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.