Cox says he was promised that Revenue would be bumped up to a cabinet level agency but that never happened. He says it should have. According to the former Madisonville mayor, the state budget office was essentially making the decisions on tax collections and he felt uncomfortable with that set up. Cox says "the people making the revenue estimates shouldn't be the ones collecting the money." According to Cox, he ordered Revenue Department staff to collect as much money as possible as quickly as possible and to disperse tax refunds as quickly as possible. But he claims the folks in the Governor's budget office wanted to "slow walk" collections and refunds so the monthly revenue figures and end-of-the-fiscal year numbers were close to projections and not too big or too small. When I asked Governor Beshear last week if the Revenue Department was "slow walking" refunds to Kentucky taxpayers, he replied "not that I'm aware of."

Cox says there was no health incident and no major blow up that caused him to quit. He says the difference of opinion on the handling of the Revenue Department as well as the fact that eight of the top administrators are retiring before the end of the year, prompted him to call it quits. Cox says he plans to work for David Boswell's congressional campaign in some capacity.