The Alaska Senate on Monday unanimously approved a law strengthening the state’s oversight of the oil tax system, a move that lawmakers say is crucial to ensure the state is collecting the taxes it’s due.
Senate Bill 183 was sparked after the Alaska Department of Revenue in 2019 stopped sharing detailed information about the oil and gas tax audit data, which left the Legislature’s auditor unable to give a full picture of the system to legislators. That’s particularly important because the state has a statute of limitations for unpaid taxes.
The move cut off the flow of information to legislators — and the public — about the total amount of additional taxes, interest and penalties incurred by oil and gas companies on an annual basis.
At a hearing last week, Legislative Auditor Kris Curtis said she has had to deliver “qualified” reports that reflect the incomplete information about the state’s oil and gas tax system and whether there are outstanding taxes yet to be paid.
“It raises a lot of red flags,” she told the Senate Rules Committee, “and I have concerns from the audit perspective of why. I’d like to help determine that. Not just for you but for the public.”
The possibility of unpaid taxes isn’t hypothetical, either. In 2018, the Alaska Tax Division announced that there was $275 million in unpaid taxes following the completion of audits of 2011 tax returns, which was just weeks before the six-year statute of limitations ran out.
During the Senate floor debate, Anchorage Democratic Sen. Bill Wielechowski noted that the total amount of unpaid taxes over the years has been more than a billion dollars.
“Why does this matter?” he said. “Because the stakes are high. The 2018 data provided by the department covered six years of assessments and showed more than $1.3 billion in additional tax and interest. That’s not theoretical. That’s real money resulting from real audits directly affecting the state’s bottom line.”
Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage, is the chair of the Legislative Budget and Audit Committee and said during the floor debate that many efforts to get detailed information on the oil and tax system have been denied by the state. She said that sets a dangerous precedent.
“If executive branch agencies can pick and choose what information to provide or in what format, then they can intentionally or not obstruct the Legislature’s ability to perform independent oversight on behalf of the public, effectively hiding billions of dollars from public view,” she said. “Frankly, this is action we should have taken some time ago.”
Even conservative Republicans who are typically closely aligned with the Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration were supportive of the measure. They said their main concern, that the legislative auditor might “go rogue,” was addressed and that the Legislature’s constitutional right to audit and review the state was being properly exerted.
Senate Bill 183 is on the fast-track for this session and is already scheduled for a hearing in the House Rules Committee on Thursday morning.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the daily politics newsletter, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
