State auditor tells Appropriations Committee that reported ROI and program outcomes may be misleading

State Auditor Doug told the House Appropriations Committee on April 7, 2026, that state reports on economic-development incentives and several other programs rely on assumptions and applicant-reported figures that can make outcomes look better than the underlying evidence supports.

Doug said the state’s outcomes reporting contains striking numbers—most prominently a claim that every dollar awarded by the VEGGIE incentive program produced $43 in economic activity—which he described as implausible without stronger validation and better measures of causality. "That makes the 43-to-1 return on investment number crazy," he said, adding that the published figure conflates capital investment with fiscal return and does not account for background growth that would have occurred independent of the incentive.

The auditor said the historical cost-benefit model uses an industry-average background growth rate; his office tested company-specific growth rates using tax-department data for a sample of about 20 VEGGIE applicants and found materially different results. "Some companies were growing much faster than the industry average. Some were growing slower," he said, and that discrepancy would, in many cases, change the size of an award or whether an award would be justified at all.

Doug also raised repeated concerns about other programs: tax-increment financing (referred to in the hearing as "TIFF"), the Vermont Training Program (VTP), and the Apex Accelerators program (formerly VTAP). On TIFF, he said many annual reports assume zero background grand-list growth for the life of a district—a choice that inflates TIFF’s attributed benefits—and used a project he called "Wooki" as an example where a reported $2.66 million benefit included other public funding and where only about $1.6 million went to the state education fund.

On VTP, Doug said the program’s headline metric compares trainee wage outcomes to the statewide average even though most VTP participants are concentrated in manufacturing; he called that an "apples-to-oranges" comparison. He also noted the program reports earned income rather than hourly wages and uses a five-quarter follow-up window rather than the more typical four-quarter labor-statistics cycle, which introduces additional methodological risk.

Describing Apex/VTAP reporting, Doug said the state’s outcomes report often lists total contract activity and dollar values drawn from applications, but much of that activity is performed by a small number of repeat, experienced contractors who do not need state assistance. "They report thousands of contracts and hundreds of millions of dollars, but much of it is indirect or applicant-reported," he said.

Committee members asked how legislators should act on program design and funding in light of these problems. Doug recommended not approving programs until key performance measures are agreed on and insisted agencies adopt better data collection SOPs and clearer definitions of outputs versus validated outcomes. He said his office will produce recommendations later this year and that a targeted report on VEGGIE and company-specific background-growth analysis will be released in a few weeks.

The committee took no formal action during the auditor’s appearance. Members thanked the auditor and said they would review the forthcoming report before considering any legislative responses or statutory changes.

The Appropriations Committee plans to receive the auditor’s VEGGIE-related report in the coming weeks and indicated the audit’s findings could inform discussions about model assumptions, agency reporting standards and whether some statutory requirements (for example, who oversees the background-growth assumptions) warrant change.