Reforming (and Saving) the IRS by Respecting the Public's Right to Know
The current controversy involving possible political targeting by the IRS in administering the exempt organization (EO) tax laws is simply the latest in a long succession of similar allegations spanning at least five decades. This article proposes to address the problem through increased transparency of the IRS’s administrative actions involving EOs. Greater transparency responds directly to the public’s frustration in not being able to monitor the agency and gain confidence that the laws are being applied in an even-handed manner.Proposals to increase the transparency of government commonly confront some claimed governmental interest in secrecy, such as a national security or law enforcement concern. Transparency of the government’s tax decisions, however, encounters the further problem that it violates the privacy rights of taxpayers. This latter clash arises because the government’s tax administration decisions generally turn on the information it has extracted under compulsion from taxpayers. Thus, meaningful transparency of one (the government’s tax decisions) almost necessarily requires meaningful transparency of the other (taxpayer tax return information). Fortunately, Congress has long recognized good policy reasons to make public a substantial amount of EO tax return information. Thus, slight liberalizations of the existing disclosure rules for such information may allow sufficient transparency to satisfy the public’s right to know in the precise area of the law that has generated the most controversy. Opening up more EO tax return information and IRS EO decision-making to public scrutiny would tend to deter IRS misbehavior, reduce suspicions of such misconduct, and promote fuller communication both to establish any impropriety and avert false charges against the agency.
The Role of Nonpartisan Staff in the Legislative Process
This short paper explains why the value of nonpartisan staff in the legislative process may stem primarily from the staff’s responsibilities to serve a broad group of legislators with heterogeneous interests, rather than on the “nonpartisan” nature of the staff. An earlier version of this paper was delivered in April, 2013, as the keynote address to a tax symposium sponsored by the Northwestern University Law School in celebration of the centennial of the modern income tax.
Professionals and "Entrepreneurs": Staff Orientations and Policy Making on Three Senate Committees
It has been the contention of many political scientists studying Congress, and often of reformers within Congress itself, that increases in staff expertise and a general upgrading of information resources are necessary if Congress is to retain or regain its lawmaking capacities and to escape complete dominance by the executive.' At the same time, it is often stressed that staff appointments based on patronage and political considerations are ill-suited to modern needs. What is preferable, according to this view, is a competent, "professional" staff for each committee-a staff well versed in the subject matter at hand, accessible to, and capable of, augmenting the capacity of each member to make rational policy choices. A recent article by Nelson Polsby, while stressing the political and interest-oriented character of policy analysis as it takes place in Congress, nonetheless shares this general perspective: