(The Center Square) – North Carolina Secreatry of Secretary of State Elaine Marshall said Tuesday that stagnant funding for her office by the Legislature threatens the progress the state is making in attracting new businesses.
The workload of the office has doubled since 2017 as the number of new businesses in the state has increased, Marshall told state leaders in the monthly meeting of the Council of State.
“Yet staffing levels have remained largely unchanged,” she said.
Although technology has helped speed up business filings, human employees are still essential, she added.
Almost all the money the secretary of state’s office collects in filing fees is deposited into the state’s general fund, Marshall said. Last fiscal year, the office deposited nearly $220 million into the general fund, she said. The office was appropriated $19 million by the General Assembly, she said.
The 183 employees in the office produced more than $1 million each in revenue for the state, Marshal said.
“Simply put, we earned the best return on investment in state government,” she said.
If it were a private company, she said, the office would rank with companies such as Microsoft and Amazon.
The office is one of the first encounters many entrepreneurs have with the state, Marshall said. But the employees are among the lowest paid in the state, she added.
“Our mission is to support North Carolina’s thriving business community, the millions of buy, sell, lend and borrow investment transactions that power our economy,” Marshall said. “For that prosperity to continue, businesses need predictability and predictability requires a reliable well-resourced secretary of state’s office.”
The ability to help businesses launch quickly is one of the reasons North Carolina is consistently ranked as one of the top states in the nation for business, she said.
“We must be able to keep pace,” she said. “This is no longer a challenge, it is a risk.”
The office has consistently asked the Legislature for more staff positions with no luck, Marshall said. She noted that the state is now entering the calendar year with no new budget approved as was required by state law to be enacted on July 1.
Gov. Josh Stein agreed with Marshall that the state needs to pass a budget but he cited some of the other funding needs of the state.
“We have public safety officers who are not being paid well, we have teachers who are earning less money on a real basis than they were a year ago,” he said.
Stein said teacher pay ranks 49th in the country and 50th when compared to the state’s gross domestic product.
“These are numbers in which we can take no pride,” Stein said.
Several entities use various metrics to achieve teacher pay rankings.
For example, the National Education Association says for 2025-26 North Carolina ranks 43rd, dropping five spots from the previous year. The Reason Foundation ranking is 49th.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal government arm, doesn’t have state by state rankings.
