From the NJ Editorial on Sunday:
With new regulations and contract consultants
What new regulations? Seriously — there was a major revision to the statutes in 2005, additional revisions in 2007, and the last seems to be in 2008. Now these links are from the Delaware Captive Insurance Association, which is an industry group, so I imagine they are keeping up on the regs here.
Interestingly, this same Association provides more data on the number and growth of Delaware Captives since the 2005 statute revision:
The State of Delaware licensed 22 Captives in 2008, bringing its total number of active
licenses to 40. This represents 122% growth during the calendar year and marks a
significant increase over the 5 captives that were licensed prior to the revision of the
Delaware statute in 2005.
So there were 5 captives here before 2005 and 40 by the close of 2008. Meaning that Delaware added 35 captives since 2005 and 22 of those licensed in 2008. So there already was an effort to add these companies to the revenue rolls, there was no new legislation and the NJ is buying lock, stock and barrel the ICs narrative that there is something new about this. When the only thing that is really new about this is the hiring of campaign crony(s) — and paying them more money — to take over an effort that has been ongoing and functional since 2005 or 2006.
There was an opportunity for real reporting or even for weighing in on how state agencies decide to spend revenues for the possibility of increasing those revenues or even how to get these agencies to be more accountable for these spending initiatives.