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You would think that the leaders of businesses getting incentives would at least know their companies were receiving them. After all, the reason governments give incentives is to attract and keep businesses.

But a UNC researcher found that 62 percent of the "top officials" at businesses getting incentives from the state of North Carolina didn't know their companies had them.

Brent Lane, of the UNC Center for Competitive Economies, offered this surprising stat recently when talking before a state legislative committee that's considering overhauling North Carolina's incentives program.

That one statistic alone seems to indicate that an overhaul is needed. But other data also indicate that the state's incentives program needs revising.

A big reason states provide incentives is to attract businesses to economically distressed areas. Yet the data show most of North Carolina's incentives don't help those places. Instead, they go to the state's wealthier counties and to a relatively few businesses.

Research also has found that the incentives process is overly complicated. The result is that many businesses that are granted incentives end up not taking them. Lane found that while more than $2 billion in incentives had been granted to businesses from 1996 to 2006 through the state's Lee Act, only $600 million had been taken.

Researchers also found that incentives are far down the list of reasons businesses give as relocation factors. One business magazine ranks them as No. 8, behind highway access, skilled labor and other concerns.

So should the state do away with incentives? Not necessarily. Research indicates that discretionary incentives -- ones given through the One North Carolina Fund -- are more effective at moving the needle.

In other words, incentives that state leaders can craft for a specific company have gotten better results than more general, tax-credit-oriented incentives.

This is good news for a cash-strapped state government, as it implies that "a more with less" approach to incentives might be the best strategy.