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.
In Praise of Ex Ante Regulation
Timing is an important consideration in regulatory design. Corrective taxes are usually imposed before or contemporaneously with the harmful activity they are aimed at preventing, while tort awards are assessed ex post, in its aftermath. Patents and research grants both can encourage innovation, but patents pay off only after the invention is marketed. In a world of perfect information, fully rational actors, and complete credit or insurance markets, time would not matter. In the real world, though, the failure of one or more of these assumptions can change dramatically the impact of a regulatory option. For example, prior commentators have largely favored ex post incentives on the ground that government has much better information after the regulated activity is complete. This Article argues that the consensus in favor of ex post regulation overlooks some important considerations. Ex post regulation does provide useful additional information when regulated parties are heterogeneous, but also carries significant and sometimes prohibitive social cost, especially when externalities are produced by limited-liability firms. Further, drawing on results from mathematical simulations, I show that the costs of heterogeneity can be sharply reduced with even modest up-front information. I apply these insights to a series of examples, including the obesity crisis, the regulation of systemic risk in the banking sector, state fiscal failures, and the design of the IP system.
Cognitive Correlaretes of Physics Achievement of Some Nigeria Senior Secondary Students
Some cognitive correlates of physics achievement of some Nigeria senior secondary students were considered in the study. Specifically, the study examined the relationship between measures of student’s field independency. Cognitive tasks, formal reasoning and their achievement in physics. Purposive and stratified random sampling techniques were employed to obtain a sample of 524 senior secondary two students from six education zones in Kogi State of Nigeria. Three instruments were used. They are science Reasoning Tasks (SRTs). Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) and Physics Achievement Test (PAT). Data analysis using multiple regressions reveals that measures of students’ fields’ independency and cognitive tasks predicted student’s achievement in physics generally. However, only measure of field independency predicted students’ achievement in physics in the higher order cognitive demand questions. Measures of formal reasoning had no significant relationship with students’ achievements in physics generally or in higher order cognitive demand questions in physics. However, the overall relationships between measures of field independency, cognitive tasks, formal reasoning and students’ achievement in physics generally and in higher order cognitive demand questions in physics were both significant. Educational implications of these findings were discussed.