# Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration The Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration (DFA) is the state agency that administers the [[Act 548 (2025)]] data-center sales-tax-exemption program. Per the Act 548 enrolled text (Tier-2 record on the [[Act 548 (2025)]] concept page), the 2025 act moved qualification applications from the [[Arkansas Economic Development Commission]] to DFA, with AEDC retaining only the "positive cost-benefit analysis" prerequisite; DFA's own fiscal note scored the five-fold threshold reduction "Revenue neutral" while noting the agency had "no process" for administering sales-and-use-tax exemption incentive programs and would need a new six-position office to run one. In this corpus DFA is also one of the investigation's non-responsive FOIA custodians: it received a data-center FOIA request on 2026-05-19 and, as of 2026-06-10, has produced nothing — remaining silent past the § 25-19-107 final-demand window (EOB 2026-06-08), its only inbound replies being automated out-of-office messages. ## People - [[Adrianne Larison]] — active FOIA contact, named as Janis Bartlett's successor in the 2026-05-22 auto-reply ([[2026-05 DFA FOIA Routing Auto-Replies]]). - [[Scott Hardin]] — staffer on the `[email protected]` shared-mailbox forwarding chain; 2026-05-28 out-of-office auto-reply ([[2026-05 DFA FOIA Routing Auto-Replies]]). - [[Janis Bartlett]] — retired FOIA staffer whose account auto-redirects FOIA mail to Larison ([[2026-05 DFA FOIA Routing Auto-Replies]]). ## Roles in this corpus - **Act 548 administrator.** Under Act 548 of 2025, data-center qualification applications shift from AEDC to DFA; DFA administers the sales-tax exemption (including the electricity exemption), and AEDC performs the cost-benefit-analysis prerequisite. See [[Act 548 (2025)]] (Primary-source record section, archived 2026-06-04). - **Non-responsive FOIA custodian.** FOIA'd 2026-05-19 for Act 548 tax-exemption administration records; no production, no substantive response, and no written time-extension followed the 2026-05-22 follow-up or the 2026-05-28 second escalation ([[2026-05 Second FOIA Escalation Round]]). The only replies were the routing auto-replies that identified the agency's FOIA personnel ([[2026-05 DFA FOIA Routing Auto-Replies]]). The silence persisted past the second-escalation deadline (EOB 2026-06-03) and the § 25-19-107 final-demand window (EOB 2026-06-08) — see [[2026-06 State Data-Center FOIAs Miss Second-Escalation Deadline]]. ## Notes The DFA request matters to the investigation because DFA, as the Act 548 administrator, is the custodian most likely to hold qualification applications and certifications for specific data-center projects — records no other custodian has produced. The agency's FOIA shared mailbox (`[email protected]`) is a multi-recipient forwarding mailbox rather than a single-custodian inbox, per the two routing auto-replies of 2026-05-22 and 2026-05-28.