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This is normal. The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government,

This is normal. The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules. This, and in combination with significant lobbying, means that given enough time the industry being regulated gets to have significant amount of control over the rules being created. Oil, airflight, cars, steel production, cable television industry, etc etc. Everything that the government tries regulate suffers the same fate to differing degrees. And when it comes to certain industries, like banking or medical industry, and handful of executives of top corporations end up rotating in and out of government. Being a VP one year, a lobbyist for a couple years, and then end up as a higher level bureaucrat on some cabinet or board somewhere. They have a phrase for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

whatshisface 7y ago
This sounds like a great application for all of those professors who know a lot but never go to the industry.
r00fus 7y ago
There are ways to fight this. Controls on corruption (aka lobbying) and removing the revolving door between industry and government would help greatly.
- aksss 7y ago
  I know I may catch shit for this but lobbying is not synonymous with corruption. Lobbying, lobbying groups and lobbyists actually serve a very valuable role in the interface between the government and the people their rules impact. Like every endeavor, bad actors can give the whole system a negative stereotype but judging anything by its worst examples is not a reasonable way to assess that thing. And no, I’m not in anyway a lobbyist or associated with that industry.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    > lobbying is not synonymous with corruption No, but I'd wager is just as often as not
  - p1esk 7y ago
    Lobbying is not the problem, money changing hands is. In its current form, lobbying works through campaign contributions (and potentially other favors). These are not “worst examples”, it’s standard practice. Why do you think a politician would listen to someone representing Comcast’s interests? Prohibit campaign contributions and you will have politicians listen to what regular people want a lot more.
    - eru 7y ago
      Compare and contrast https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Politicians listen to lobbyists because it is impossible for a human to understand all laws they pass. I'm in favor of things like the "read the bills act", but the only thing they really do is allow time for groups interested in the law to read the final text and mobilize their members to write vote X on the bill letters. Sure I can read one bill and understand the details, but it would take more months than there are in a session (2 years) to UNDERSTAND all the bills congress passes. If I were a lawyer I could understand them a little faster, but not enough to make a difference. The result is congress needs trusted experts to write the laws for them. Very few people are experts in anything useful that they are not paid for. (the exceptions are things like movie watcher - which congress is already as much an expert as everyone else)
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - pengstrom 7y ago
    It's giving groups with money outsized influence, undermining the democratic process. It's corruption.
- ElonMuskrat 7y ago
  Our best and brightest don't go into government because the government does not offer competitive compensation.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    But compensation is not the only motivator. And in a more equitable society (eg one where illness doesn't threaten total financial ruin), it would be less important.
  - carapace 7y ago
    Are you saying our "best and brightest" are too greedy to [want to] govern [well]? That seems self-contradictory to me.
    - ElonMuskrat 7y ago
      You are putting words into my mouth. Plenty of individuals pursue high-paying jobs because the financial security it provides their family [including children, spouse, and possibly infirm parents]; and to pay back the student loan burden that the American institution levies on their best and brightest.
    - thw0rted 7y ago
      I worked in a government job that demanded strong technical expertise. We got two kinds of people: those who knew they could make a lot more money in the private sector but took the civilian job out of a sense of duty or a desire for stability, and those who weren't smart enough for the private sector and knew they could get away with half-assing it in the government. The problem was that people with valuable skills and expertise got lumped in with the paper pushers at the DMV every time a politician lined up to kick the "overpaid government workers" football, so Congress wouldn't let them pay industry rates. Result: the "best and brightest" took advantage of lucrative programs like student debt forgiveness, got some good experience on their resume, then left for industry and literally doubled or tripled their salaries overnight.
incompatible 7y ago
I'd have thought the government would need to maintain some expertise in the "industry" of collecting taxes, at least. When I file a tax return in Australia, I do it via a government website.
- TylerE 7y ago
  A major complication is that here in the US we have local (city/county), state, and national taxes, all of which can vary by location.
  - scriptdevil 7y ago
    The way India handles that is by having a progressive income tax that is collected at the federal level and sales taxes at both the federal and local level (CGST and SGST). Apart from federal funding of states, they also get all the SGST taxes and are free to set their rates for fuel, road taxes etc. Having multiple levels of income tax is always painful. Also, the government provides free java/excel based tax filing systems with a certain level of sanity checking. Apart from this there are several fremium sites like cleartax to help file taxes but they don't get to lobby. (yes, corruption is inherent and tax evasion is rampant, but at least filing taxes aren't as painful as US tax filing seems to be)
    - aitchnyu 7y ago
      To nitick, employees don't need to use Java on the web to file taxes. IIRC there is also XML so other software may generate it.
  - bobbydroptables 7y ago
    This isn't a reason that the feds couldn't do it, though. (The federal government only deals with one kind of taxes: federal taxes). It's only an argument that the state and local governments would need their own, parallel systems if they wanted to participate.
    - swebs 7y ago
Super_Jambo 7y ago
It's common but if you look around the world the level of regulatory capture in the US is in no way normal. Blame the combination of a terrible voting system and relatively few representatives compared to the incredible prize of a slice of America's giant economy. But reform is possible, effectively regulated competitive markets exist, other countries manage it. America can too if you're willing to work to make it happen.
dmix 7y ago
There’s always a whole lot of idealism when people call for regulations as a panacea. Then you end up with companies like Boeing who are the only players in the country and no one even tries to compete given the massive overhead and then people get surprised the one company who gets 99% of the oversight ends up having a say in the oversight. This type of thing needs constant vigilance and churn to avoid capture. But at the end of the day it’s just going to come with the whole arrangement every once in a while. Of course we could come up with ways to have this type of oversight which the market can’t practically account for financially or organizationally but again that’s wishful thinking as almost every situation like this has resulted in some level of capture. Pretty much the only option is hoping they actually attempt to fix processes when it goes wrong, at least for the next while. But more often than not rules get rushed in during the panics which merely reinforces the company’s monopoly by adding even more special rules only a billion dollar entrenched company with the decades of other specialized processes they themselves helped establish through lobbying. No one wants to remove regulations for the sake of competition but I think we need to be more realistic about the monsters we’re creating in exchange for worse monsters. Instead of being surprised every time the fragility of the whole system gets exposed at least once a decade. While perpetually hoping and expecting for better oversight for the next time it.
- eru 7y ago
  That sentiment applies a lot in banking. See eg https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-canada/ https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-can...
- justin66 7y ago
  > There’s always a whole lot of idealism when people call for regulations as a panacea. Literally no one ever calls for regulations "as a panacea."
  - dmix 7y ago
    Calling it that and rabidly using it like a hammer every time the smallest problems happen, regardless of long term side effects which prevent bad behaviour from being replaced by better companies, is not much different... at all.
AdieuToLogic 7y ago
> The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules. That was not always the case. Once upon a time, there was the Office of Technology Assessment[0]. As to why it is no more, one need look no further than Newt Gingrich[1][2]: > OTA was abolished (technically "de-funded") in the "Contract with America" period of Newt Gingrich's Republican ascendancy in Congress. According to Science magazine, "some Republican lawmakers came to view [the OTA] as duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party."[0] 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen... 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-much-needed-and-sane-congressional-office-that-gingrich-killed-off-and-we-need-back/264160/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-m... 2 - https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-the-destruction-of-congressional-expertise/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-t...
- edraferi 7y ago
  Correct. Warren proposes to reinstate it: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/to-curb-lobbying-power-elizabeth-warren-wants-to-reinstate-the-office-of-technology-assessment/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/to-curb-lobbying-power-eli... OTA isn’t a panacea though. You have to figure out ways to make it financially reasonable for people to blow the whistle on massive firms. The Waste, Fraud and Abuse laws might be a good template.
  - devonkim 7y ago
    Not the only presidential candidate for it. Not sure if Bernie is for it but I think he’s mostly reasonable and would be for it https://www.yang2020.com/policies/reviveota/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/reviveota/
- kortilla 7y ago
  The OTA didn’t solve the problem at hand. A separate office with even less expertise than the one regulating the industry is not in a position to suggest sane regulations. What could the OTA bring to the table when it came to regulating something like mines that the EPA/DEQ wouldn’t have?
mattacular 7y ago
I'm sorry but is your argument here that the IRS doesn't have experts in tax law?
- bluGill 7y ago
  No, the argument is that those IRS experts in tax law switch jobs between writing the regulations for the IRS, and then doing "various tasks" for the private companies that work in tax, including lobbying congress for more complex tax laws thus ensuring more people have to use the private tax companies to get their taxes right as opposed to taxes being simple enough to understand without needing help. While you could lobby congress yourself, odds are you don't really understand tax law in detail well enough to be effective, while they do.
  - mattacular 7y ago
    Thanks for clarifying your argument. I disagree though that lack of understanding is what prevents people from lobbying congress themselves. People and even organizations in favor of simplifying the law cannot compete with, eg. intuit's 2.5 million $ lobbying spend in 2018. Why should individual people have to lobby their congress in a democratic system anyway? If you look at polling data on this subject it will show a majority of Americans in favor of tax code simplification. Yet in the past few years we've actually received the opposite.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      Everybody is in favor of simplification until it eliminates the complex part that benefits them. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction harms a lot of people because their taxes go up significantly. (the latest tax reform pushed the standard deduction high enough that most people don't gain anything by deducting their interest - maybe in a few years nobody will care anymore and this can be eliminated) People want simplified taxes, but they write letters and vote when their taxes go up, so more complex taxes are rewarded despite that want.
Razengan 7y ago
> The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules. A government, for the people, should ask the users and customers of the corporations, its citizens who suffer the most from top-down decisions. What recourse do average citizens have when corporations, which must always act in their own interest, decide to prey on them? Governments are supposed to protect us from that shit. It should be a triangle: People choose which corporations to support, governments make sure people have a choice.
ransom1538 7y ago
"The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry." Funny. Yes. I worked at a consulting firm doing permitting for California (wetland delineations etc). The only way to get something approved was to use a former gov employee. They could write a proposal "correctly", attach the correct docs, etc. Gov employees knew the cash wasn't in their position, but, in consulting later on. Tin foil hat on: I also think, the Gov employees knew when a proposal wasn't from a former Gov employee -- and would reject -- thus keeping the cycle going.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  This is 100% opposite my experience in wetland water quality permits. Sorry your state has super corrupt army corps districts. Ours (NC) let's all kind of stuff slide, but we still do thorough work that meets all applicable regulations even when the assessor insists they don't need the entire NRTR.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    I'm in the northeast and my state is exactly like CA in this regard (source: good chunk of immediate and extended family works for the state). I've lived in three other states too and they weren't like that but they were all rural enough where people didn't really need government permission to do what they wanted and the political will to go after reasonable people doing reasonable things but without government approval wasn't there. Everywhere I've ever lived I've seen a pretty wide variation from place to place within a state that seems to get applied on top of the state's baseline. In the poorer areas anything reasonable pretty much gets waved on through and in the rich areas they're much more controlling (because they have the resources to throw at it) and you can benefit from hiring people who know people or are at least known as "regulars" to whatever official is calling the shots. It's a lot like hiring a traffic lawyer.
- NikolaNovak 7y ago
  I've seen similar situations in Canada: - In Nova Scotia, an acquaintance food & safety inspector became a consultant to industry on how to navigate the arcane laws of food & safety. There was no fraud or wonkiness there that I could easily perceive - the companies wanted to do the right thing; knew they were not experts in what the right thing is; so hired a person they were confident knew what the right thing is. - Though we had our own bright security analysts in the company I worked for, when dealing with the public sector we have been heavily advised, and learned the wisdom of, hiring from a pool of rotating local security analysts that knew how to write documents, architecture, assessment in a way that would clearly conform to regulations. Again, not due to any wonkiness - our security analysts who knew the product worked with security analysts who knew the rules, to make sure solution is amenable to all.
emiliobumachar 7y ago
Even when we accept the issue per se, there remains the problem of trying to hide it. Why was the FOIA request originally denied?
throwaway_law 7y ago
Its certainly the norm for industry leaders to lobby and even propose draft rules/legislation to regulators/legislators...however, it is not normal for the government to willfully hide communications from the industry to government (which was done by the IRS in response to a FOIA request) and its outright illegal for the government to pay/reimburse the lobbyists themselves which the IRS seemed to do here. That's right your tax payer dollars were used to pay for lobbyists travel expenses to lobby the IRS to the detriment of taxpayers.
dh2424 7y ago
I agree with you for 99% of businesses, except this is the exact situation where your argument doesn't apply. The IRS should know a thing or two about filing taxes, should they not?
mgleason_3 7y ago
> This is normal. Whoa there. It may happen, it may even be common, but it’s certainly not expected or ok. There’s also a huge difference between the regulatory capture of businesses like oil, airlines and banking that pose danger so the government regulates them, and this situation where the IRS apparently decided it was more expedient to essentially give these companies a business rather than write software that would implement their own regulations. So, it’s a very different situation. In fact you’ve got to wonder what the IRS is thinking. They should be holding all the cards. But they act like the Intuit has them over a barrel. The IRS gave them a business under certain conditions. Intuit has failed to meet the terms of the agreement. So, start writing the software and terminate the agreement once its ready.
anigbrowl 7y ago
The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. False premise. Most experts on/in a given field are employed within it, but employment/economic interest is by no means a prerequisite for expertise. Regulatory capture is a real thing, but it's fallacious to argue that because regulatory capture exists, governance is the problem. After all, markets are just as easily captured as governments, and businesses are open in their pursuit of market share and monopoly.
enighma 7y ago
Isn't that the problem though? That we call this normal. It's definitely not the case on other democracies around the world.

whatshisface 7y ago

This sounds like a great application for all of those professors who know a lot but never go to the industry.

r00fus 7y ago

There are ways to fight this. Controls on corruption (aka lobbying) and removing the revolving door between industry and government would help greatly.

aksss 7y ago
I know I may catch shit for this but lobbying is not synonymous with corruption. Lobbying, lobbying groups and lobbyists actually serve a very valuable role in the interface between the government and the people their rules impact. Like every endeavor, bad actors can give the whole system a negative stereotype but judging anything by its worst examples is not a reasonable way to assess that thing. And no, I’m not in anyway a lobbyist or associated with that industry.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  > lobbying is not synonymous with corruption No, but I'd wager is just as often as not
- p1esk 7y ago
  Lobbying is not the problem, money changing hands is. In its current form, lobbying works through campaign contributions (and potentially other favors). These are not “worst examples”, it’s standard practice. Why do you think a politician would listen to someone representing Comcast’s interests? Prohibit campaign contributions and you will have politicians listen to what regular people want a lot more.
  - eru 7y ago
    Compare and contrast https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Politicians listen to lobbyists because it is impossible for a human to understand all laws they pass. I'm in favor of things like the "read the bills act", but the only thing they really do is allow time for groups interested in the law to read the final text and mobilize their members to write vote X on the bill letters. Sure I can read one bill and understand the details, but it would take more months than there are in a session (2 years) to UNDERSTAND all the bills congress passes. If I were a lawyer I could understand them a little faster, but not enough to make a difference. The result is congress needs trusted experts to write the laws for them. Very few people are experts in anything useful that they are not paid for. (the exceptions are things like movie watcher - which congress is already as much an expert as everyone else)
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- pengstrom 7y ago
  It's giving groups with money outsized influence, undermining the democratic process. It's corruption.
ElonMuskrat 7y ago
Our best and brightest don't go into government because the government does not offer competitive compensation.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  But compensation is not the only motivator. And in a more equitable society (eg one where illness doesn't threaten total financial ruin), it would be less important.
- carapace 7y ago
  Are you saying our "best and brightest" are too greedy to [want to] govern [well]? That seems self-contradictory to me.
  - ElonMuskrat 7y ago
    You are putting words into my mouth. Plenty of individuals pursue high-paying jobs because the financial security it provides their family [including children, spouse, and possibly infirm parents]; and to pay back the student loan burden that the American institution levies on their best and brightest.
  - thw0rted 7y ago
    I worked in a government job that demanded strong technical expertise. We got two kinds of people: those who knew they could make a lot more money in the private sector but took the civilian job out of a sense of duty or a desire for stability, and those who weren't smart enough for the private sector and knew they could get away with half-assing it in the government. The problem was that people with valuable skills and expertise got lumped in with the paper pushers at the DMV every time a politician lined up to kick the "overpaid government workers" football, so Congress wouldn't let them pay industry rates. Result: the "best and brightest" took advantage of lucrative programs like student debt forgiveness, got some good experience on their resume, then left for industry and literally doubled or tripled their salaries overnight.

incompatible 7y ago

I'd have thought the government would need to maintain some expertise in the "industry" of collecting taxes, at least. When I file a tax return in Australia, I do it via a government website.

TylerE 7y ago
A major complication is that here in the US we have local (city/county), state, and national taxes, all of which can vary by location.
- scriptdevil 7y ago
  The way India handles that is by having a progressive income tax that is collected at the federal level and sales taxes at both the federal and local level (CGST and SGST). Apart from federal funding of states, they also get all the SGST taxes and are free to set their rates for fuel, road taxes etc. Having multiple levels of income tax is always painful. Also, the government provides free java/excel based tax filing systems with a certain level of sanity checking. Apart from this there are several fremium sites like cleartax to help file taxes but they don't get to lobby. (yes, corruption is inherent and tax evasion is rampant, but at least filing taxes aren't as painful as US tax filing seems to be)
  - aitchnyu 7y ago
    To nitick, employees don't need to use Java on the web to file taxes. IIRC there is also XML so other software may generate it.
- bobbydroptables 7y ago
  This isn't a reason that the feds couldn't do it, though. (The federal government only deals with one kind of taxes: federal taxes). It's only an argument that the state and local governments would need their own, parallel systems if they wanted to participate.
  - swebs 7y ago

Super_Jambo 7y ago

It's common but if you look around the world the level of regulatory capture in the US is in no way normal. Blame the combination of a terrible voting system and relatively few representatives compared to the incredible prize of a slice of America's giant economy. But reform is possible, effectively regulated competitive markets exist, other countries manage it. America can too if you're willing to work to make it happen.

dmix 7y ago

There’s always a whole lot of idealism when people call for regulations as a panacea. Then you end up with companies like Boeing who are the only players in the country and no one even tries to compete given the massive overhead and then people get surprised the one company who gets 99% of the oversight ends up having a say in the oversight. This type of thing needs constant vigilance and churn to avoid capture. But at the end of the day it’s just going to come with the whole arrangement every once in a while. Of course we could come up with ways to have this type of oversight which the market can’t practically account for financially or organizationally but again that’s wishful thinking as almost every situation like this has resulted in some level of capture. Pretty much the only option is hoping they actually attempt to fix processes when it goes wrong, at least for the next while. But more often than not rules get rushed in during the panics which merely reinforces the company’s monopoly by adding even more special rules only a billion dollar entrenched company with the decades of other specialized processes they themselves helped establish through lobbying. No one wants to remove regulations for the sake of competition but I think we need to be more realistic about the monsters we’re creating in exchange for worse monsters. Instead of being surprised every time the fragility of the whole system gets exposed at least once a decade. While perpetually hoping and expecting for better oversight for the next time it.

eru 7y ago
That sentiment applies a lot in banking. See eg https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-canada/ https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-can...
justin66 7y ago
> There’s always a whole lot of idealism when people call for regulations as a panacea. Literally no one ever calls for regulations "as a panacea."
- dmix 7y ago
  Calling it that and rabidly using it like a hammer every time the smallest problems happen, regardless of long term side effects which prevent bad behaviour from being replaced by better companies, is not much different... at all.

AdieuToLogic 7y ago

> The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules. That was not always the case. Once upon a time, there was the Office of Technology Assessment[0]. As to why it is no more, one need look no further than Newt Gingrich[1][2]: > OTA was abolished (technically "de-funded") in the "Contract with America" period of Newt Gingrich's Republican ascendancy in Congress. According to Science magazine, "some Republican lawmakers came to view [the OTA] as duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party."[0] 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen... 1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-much-needed-and-sane-congressional-office-that-gingrich-killed-off-and-we-need-back/264160/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/the-m... 2 - https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-the-destruction-of-congressional-expertise/ https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/gingrich-and-t...

edraferi 7y ago
Correct. Warren proposes to reinstate it: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/to-curb-lobbying-power-elizabeth-warren-wants-to-reinstate-the-office-of-technology-assessment/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/27/to-curb-lobbying-power-eli... OTA isn’t a panacea though. You have to figure out ways to make it financially reasonable for people to blow the whistle on massive firms. The Waste, Fraud and Abuse laws might be a good template.
- devonkim 7y ago
  Not the only presidential candidate for it. Not sure if Bernie is for it but I think he’s mostly reasonable and would be for it https://www.yang2020.com/policies/reviveota/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/reviveota/
kortilla 7y ago
The OTA didn’t solve the problem at hand. A separate office with even less expertise than the one regulating the industry is not in a position to suggest sane regulations. What could the OTA bring to the table when it came to regulating something like mines that the EPA/DEQ wouldn’t have?

mattacular 7y ago

I'm sorry but is your argument here that the IRS doesn't have experts in tax law?

bluGill 7y ago
No, the argument is that those IRS experts in tax law switch jobs between writing the regulations for the IRS, and then doing "various tasks" for the private companies that work in tax, including lobbying congress for more complex tax laws thus ensuring more people have to use the private tax companies to get their taxes right as opposed to taxes being simple enough to understand without needing help. While you could lobby congress yourself, odds are you don't really understand tax law in detail well enough to be effective, while they do.
- mattacular 7y ago
  Thanks for clarifying your argument. I disagree though that lack of understanding is what prevents people from lobbying congress themselves. People and even organizations in favor of simplifying the law cannot compete with, eg. intuit's 2.5 million $ lobbying spend in 2018. Why should individual people have to lobby their congress in a democratic system anyway? If you look at polling data on this subject it will show a majority of Americans in favor of tax code simplification. Yet in the past few years we've actually received the opposite.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    Everybody is in favor of simplification until it eliminates the complex part that benefits them. Eliminating the mortgage interest deduction harms a lot of people because their taxes go up significantly. (the latest tax reform pushed the standard deduction high enough that most people don't gain anything by deducting their interest - maybe in a few years nobody will care anymore and this can be eliminated) People want simplified taxes, but they write letters and vote when their taxes go up, so more complex taxes are rewarded despite that want.

Razengan 7y ago

> The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. So the government, in order to try to make rules that don't suck, depend on their input when drafting the rules. A government, for the people, should ask the users and customers of the corporations, its citizens who suffer the most from top-down decisions. What recourse do average citizens have when corporations, which must always act in their own interest, decide to prey on them? Governments are supposed to protect us from that shit. It should be a triangle: People choose which corporations to support, governments make sure people have a choice.

ransom1538 7y ago

"The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry." Funny. Yes. I worked at a consulting firm doing permitting for California (wetland delineations etc). The only way to get something approved was to use a former gov employee. They could write a proposal "correctly", attach the correct docs, etc. Gov employees knew the cash wasn't in their position, but, in consulting later on. Tin foil hat on: I also think, the Gov employees knew when a proposal wasn't from a former Gov employee -- and would reject -- thus keeping the cycle going.

acollins1331 7y ago
This is 100% opposite my experience in wetland water quality permits. Sorry your state has super corrupt army corps districts. Ours (NC) let's all kind of stuff slide, but we still do thorough work that meets all applicable regulations even when the assessor insists they don't need the entire NRTR.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  I'm in the northeast and my state is exactly like CA in this regard (source: good chunk of immediate and extended family works for the state). I've lived in three other states too and they weren't like that but they were all rural enough where people didn't really need government permission to do what they wanted and the political will to go after reasonable people doing reasonable things but without government approval wasn't there. Everywhere I've ever lived I've seen a pretty wide variation from place to place within a state that seems to get applied on top of the state's baseline. In the poorer areas anything reasonable pretty much gets waved on through and in the rich areas they're much more controlling (because they have the resources to throw at it) and you can benefit from hiring people who know people or are at least known as "regulars" to whatever official is calling the shots. It's a lot like hiring a traffic lawyer.
NikolaNovak 7y ago
I've seen similar situations in Canada: - In Nova Scotia, an acquaintance food & safety inspector became a consultant to industry on how to navigate the arcane laws of food & safety. There was no fraud or wonkiness there that I could easily perceive - the companies wanted to do the right thing; knew they were not experts in what the right thing is; so hired a person they were confident knew what the right thing is. - Though we had our own bright security analysts in the company I worked for, when dealing with the public sector we have been heavily advised, and learned the wisdom of, hiring from a pool of rotating local security analysts that knew how to write documents, architecture, assessment in a way that would clearly conform to regulations. Again, not due to any wonkiness - our security analysts who knew the product worked with security analysts who knew the rules, to make sure solution is amenable to all.

emiliobumachar 7y ago

Even when we accept the issue per se, there remains the problem of trying to hide it. Why was the FOIA request originally denied?

throwaway_law 7y ago

Its certainly the norm for industry leaders to lobby and even propose draft rules/legislation to regulators/legislators...however, it is not normal for the government to willfully hide communications from the industry to government (which was done by the IRS in response to a FOIA request) and its outright illegal for the government to pay/reimburse the lobbyists themselves which the IRS seemed to do here. That's right your tax payer dollars were used to pay for lobbyists travel expenses to lobby the IRS to the detriment of taxpayers.

dh2424 7y ago

I agree with you for 99% of businesses, except this is the exact situation where your argument doesn't apply. The IRS should know a thing or two about filing taxes, should they not?

mgleason_3 7y ago

> This is normal. Whoa there. It may happen, it may even be common, but it’s certainly not expected or ok. There’s also a huge difference between the regulatory capture of businesses like oil, airlines and banking that pose danger so the government regulates them, and this situation where the IRS apparently decided it was more expedient to essentially give these companies a business rather than write software that would implement their own regulations. So, it’s a very different situation. In fact you’ve got to wonder what the IRS is thinking. They should be holding all the cards. But they act like the Intuit has them over a barrel. The IRS gave them a business under certain conditions. Intuit has failed to meet the terms of the agreement. So, start writing the software and terminate the agreement once its ready.

anigbrowl 7y ago

The only people who are experts in a particular industry are the people running the businesses that make up that industry. False premise. Most experts on/in a given field are employed within it, but employment/economic interest is by no means a prerequisite for expertise. Regulatory capture is a real thing, but it's fallacious to argue that because regulatory capture exists, governance is the problem. After all, markets are just as easily captured as governments, and businesses are open in their pursuit of market share and monopoly.

enighma 7y ago

Isn't that the problem though? That we call this normal. It's definitely not the case on other democracies around the world.