Identifying data sharing opportunities to improve tax credit access in Maryland
Maryland Governor’s Office for Children and the Office of the Comptroller of Maryland
September 2025 - October 2025
Why This Matters For Families
Across the country, millions of families are living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to afford their basics on low to moderate incomes. To support these families, 31 states and the federal government have instituted the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can provide families with thousands of dollars after filing their federal and state taxes. Tax credits have become a critical anti-poverty program in the United States, providing an essential source of cash for many American workers and families.
The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in the American Rescue Plan reduced child poverty in the United States by 40% that year. However, accessing credits like the CTC is notoriously difficult as they are claimed during annual tax filing. The bipartisan, highly successful EITC reaches only 80% of eligible households nationwide, with lower-income, less-educated households being most likely to leave money on the table compared to other populations. The IRS estimates that roughly 20% of EITC-eligible and CTC-eligible individuals do not receive the credit payments they are owed — the federal EITC alone averaged $2,500 per return in 2022.
Our research and work with other states has shown that inter-agency data sharing can improve access to tax credits. Different government agencies have the ability to identify individuals who receive other benefits and may be eligible for tax credits they did not claim.
Implementation Challenge
In Maryland, multiple statewide elected officials have made it a priority to increase tax credit uptake and reduce child poverty rates in the state. Governor Wes Moore has made reducing childhood poverty a priority for his administration, directing agencies to utilize an “all-of-government” approach to streamline and enhance access to economic benefits assistance. Governor Moore championed and signed the Family Prosperity Act into law in 2023, which made the state CTC permanent and increased the income limit, while also permanently expanding and extending the state EITC, including by removing the $530 cap for adults without qualifying children and extending eligibility for individuals who file using an Individual Tax Identification Number. Comptroller Brooke Lierman ran on a platform of increasing the state EITC and simplifying tax returns.
As a continuation of efforts to help Marylanders access the EITC and CTC, Maryland launched its #EarnedIt outreach campaign in early 2025 - led by GOC and COM and in coordination with five agencies under the Moore-Miller Administration - and saw a 7.8% increase in EITC filers between tax year 2023 and tax year 2024. To build on that success, Maryland plans to incorporate targeted outreach into the next iteration of #EarnedIt. The Governor’s Office for Children and Office of the Comptroller partnered with the New Practice Lab to explore data sharing approaches between agencies as a way to identify residents who are likely owed tax credits.
Our Approach
The New Practice Lab led a short, month-long discovery sprint to determine if the Comptroller’s office can leverage data from any of the thirteen identified benefits programs that could identify individuals’ likely eligibility for tax credits. This could then be compared with filing data to understand who may be missing out on tax credits.
Because we know that outreach alone will not sufficiently increase tax credit claims, our goal was to provide a foundation upon which Maryland could begin outreach while simultaneously laying the groundwork for more meaningful and impactful interventions when they have more capacity.
These type of actions could include:
Using shared data to pre-populate tax forms for non-filers and returning filers
Using shared data to streamline the process of filing an amended Maryland tax return
Expanding pre-population efforts to include data available from IRS’s Data Authorization and Transfer Service (DATS)
The New Practice Lab partnered with the Governor’s Office for Children (GOC) and the Comptroller of Maryland (COM) to identify data sharing opportunities between COM and other state agencies that administer benefits programs that may have the information required to identify those who qualify for the state EITC and CTC but are missing out.
OBJECTIVE
Map and identify relevant Maryland state data
WHAT WE DID
Identified data elements required to determine EITC/CTC eligibility and mapped them to other state-administered benefits programs.
Completed a data inventory of 13 programs, which, in combination with the results of NPL’s tax filing challenges report, surfaced two promising programs to explore for potential data sharing opportunities.
OBJECTIVE
Determine the feasibility of sharing data between selected benefits programs and COM for the purpose of tax credit uptake.
WHAT WE DID
With COM, GOC, Department of Human Services (DHS), and Department of Information Technology (DoIT):
Explored the use of MD’s shared data platform as data source
Documented logical data requirements as the basis for a formal data sharing agreement between COM and DHS
Designed a high-level framework for data sharing that leverages MD’s shared data platform while also adhering to the state and federal legal restrictions for handling tax data.
OBJECTIVE
Create a data sharing and landscape analysis
WHAT WE DID
Documented existing examples of state data sharing and facilitated information sharing sessions between COM and their peers in other states to share learnings.
MD COM and GOC used the analysis to inform their thinking and facilitate internal alignment on starting data sharing discussions with other agencies.
What We Learned
This engagement surfaced the value of cross-agency collaboration when considering tax credit uptake strategies that target non-filers. Maryland’s shared data platform managed by DoIT provides a more secure, accurate, and accessible way to share data than the backends of individual programs. Additionally, DoIT recently took ownership of Maryland’s unified benefits application, a potential place to highlight tax credits and allow applicants to share their data with COM to check tax credit eligibility.
Next Steps
At the end of our engagement in October, 2025, COM, DHS, and DoIT decided to explore a formal data sharing agreement to help increase awareness and uptake of the EITC and CTC.
Due to an ongoing modernization project and the implementation of H.R. 1, COM does not have capacity to pursue this work until late 2026. In the meantime, we are working to identify opportunities that lay a foundation for data sharing while aligning with COM and GOC’s shorter-term priorities, including how to integrate tax credits into Maryland’s integrated benefits application process, and provide usability, content, and measurement assistance to COM and GOC’s upcoming #EarnedIt campaign for tax credit awareness.
