The Corporate Case for Child Care

But, other than in a handful of states, the credits were poorly designed and rarely used, an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center found. Another provision in the 1981 tax bill to encourage companies to build more on-site child care centers became a way for companies to instead offer cheaper dependent care spending accounts, a strategic move, one researcher wrote, to keep corporate outlays down while still signaling a modicum of “family-friendliness and responsiveness to workers’ child care needs.”