Between now and the late January, Dell Inc. will be shedding the 500 employees still on the payroll since the PC giant announced in October that it would close its plant in Winston-Salem with some 900 workers losing their jobs. About 400 were terminated in November.

As a recent article in the Winston-Salem Journal put it, “State officials are at odds with Dell over whether the company must repay millions of dollars in tax credits that it received as part of a massive incentives deal.”

To its credit, no pun intended, Dell in early November “repaid about $15.5 million in incentives to ... Winston-Salem, about $7.9 million to Forsyth County, about $2.8 million to the Millennium Fund and about $308,000 to Forsyth County Development Corp.” In addition, company officials said in late November that it “took a $59 million noncash charge in the third quarter of its fiscal year 2010, which ended Oct. 30.”

Since then, according to news reports, Dell has decided enough is enough. It apparently doesn’t intend to reimburse the state of North Carolina for tax credits it received while meeting performance thresholds required for incentives in past years.

But the crux of the issue before us really isn’t whether Dell will repay the state anything. The topic for discussion is whether state officials have learned anything from this endeavor and will be wise enough to use considerably more common sense and provide more competent legal expertise when the next request for incentives comes roaring down the pike.

First, the state never again should be so free with taxpayer dollars – approximately $243 million in state credits – and any incentives deals should be transparent so those of us who are footing the bill easily can evaluate whether the action was worthwhile. That’s something we can’t do in the Dell case because, as the Journal reported, “The amount of credits that the company actually claimed during those years (2005-07) is not public information, and neither the department nor the company would release it.”

For shame!

We only can hope that the state will be wiser – and much more free with information – when companies again come calling for handouts. We only can hope the state will do a much better job of writing the contracts in clear, precise language, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s in incentive packages in the future and also let you in on what they are doing to you and for the company before the company gets the money. It takes statesmen/stateswomen to accomplish that.

Don’t hold your breath.