NMA backs bill to make data public after state ‘deemed’ mine tax data confidential

For decades, data on gross and net revenues at individual Nevada mines — and the amount of taxes paid on those revenues — have been at the heart of state mining tax debates and legislation.

And for decades, the data was publicly available.

A state Department of Taxation webpage linked to years of the “Net Proceeds of Minerals Bulletin,” as the annual report is called, for public perusal.

Not anymore.

Asked last week where on its website it had stashed NPOM bulletins, the Nevada Department of Taxation said via email it had determined the reports “contained confidential taxpayer information that identified tax information for the respective mines” and so “has been deemed confidential” under Nevada statute.

Though asked repeatedly, the department, through its public information office, declined to say who specifically did the deeming, when, or by what process.

Meanwhile, two Nevada Republican assemblymembers, Bert Gurr, who represents White Pine and parts of four other eastern Nevada counties, and Washoe County’s Rich DeLong, are sponsoring Assembly Bill 277, which would reverse the department’s decision.

“My understanding is that ‘someone’ in the Department of Taxation determined that the information was subject to the confidentiality provisions, since the data was not specifically exempted” from the state statute cited by the department, DeLong said via email.

AB277 would explicitly exempt the data from the confidentiality statute, thus making it available to the public.

The Nevada Mining Association supports the bill to make NPOM bulletins public again. 

“We are asking for your support for AB 277, the net proceeds on minerals transparency bill,” Nevada Mining Association President Amanda Hilton mentioned while providing an overview of the industry to the Assembly Natural Resources Committee earlier this month.

“This is important to us because we want to make sure that we can continue to have transparency in disclosing to the public what the tax impacts are and what the tax contributions are for our industry,” Hilton said.

Like DeLong, the association says it is at a loss as to why the Taxation Department deemed the reports confidential.

“The Nevada Mining Association does not have insight into why the Department of Taxation made this report confidential two years ago,” the group said in a statement Monday.

Over the years, the industry and its defenders have pointed to the reports to underscore the millions of dollars they pay in taxes, and to show how expensive it can be to produce gold, copper, and other minerals.

The reports also illustrate how declaring expenses reduces a mining operator’s tax burden. That system of taxing mining has been singled out by the industry nationally on multiple occasions to argue to Congress that if any federal tax on gold and other “hard rock” mineral production is ever implemented (none has been), it should be modeled after Nevada’s mining tax.

Proponents of higher state mining taxes have pointed to the gross and net revenues data in the annual NPOM reports to decry how the state allows the industry to substantially reduce the taxable value of gold and other minerals by deducting multiple expenses and paying taxes only on net proceeds.

For instance, in any given year, several mines in Nevada deduct enough expenses from the gross value of production that those mines pay no net proceeds on mining taxes at all on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of minerals. 

AB277 was referred to the Assembly Revenue Committee. As of Tuesday morning no hearing has been scheduled for the bill.