Getting Back to the Grassroots of Tax Administration: Because We the People Long For a Gathering of American Eagles to Restore Trust in the Internal Revenue Service with A Rebuild IRS Initiative

Like America, our Internal Revenue Service is a work in progress. Yet, for best results, it’s better to avoid thinking too much about what it is or is not! Instead, let’s think more about what the IRS ought to be! This Article thusly offers a realistic path forward with new choices for a local presence, which once again makes it taxpayer/customer-centric. For more effective tax administration, it also offers a return to something that inexcusably went missing in 1998: senior-executive “on-site oversight” of field operations. If today’s Internal Revenue Service can be fairly described as an exploding volcano of public mistrust and suspicion, which it undoubtedly is, how can we cap and fix it? That may not be an easy question; but there are reasonable answers and options. To begin with, this Article encourages a bipartisan recognition that the local presence of grassroots IRS operations is more important to the taxpaying public than what thousands of Service bureaucrats do at their desks in Washington, D.C. With the harnessed vigor of our great nation, let’s therefore finally move forward to stop the continuing perception of the IRS as a not-so-helpful, dysfunctional and robotic agency. That means no longer surrendering to the tirelessly negative forces that work against good government. For too long we have settled for an IRS-bashing new normal, sadly accepted by very many good folks across our country’s multitude of cities and towns. So, let’s finally stand up straight and begin to pay attention to the goodly case against the IRS failure to bring back more taxpayer-friendly and decentralized, senior-executive local presence, once again with pre-1998 style “on-site oversight,” to better balance and manage distant field-operations. Mindful of that call, the curtain now rises on this Article’s central message, which in part tells the back story of what went so very wrong inside the IRS of 1998 and the years that followed. In that regard, the opening scene, which takes place circa 1998, is illuminated here more openly than elsewhere before. Today, a seemingly fast eighteen years later in 2016, we discover that the agency from 1998 onward has still not fittingly accepted the challenge of restoring lost trust by, among other moves, reinventing lost, bottom-up, senior-executive grassroots local presence and field-accountability. Missing also from the story-line are: (1) the IRS’s not-yet-full recognition of a public right to more accessible, face-to-face, taxpayer/customer-centric opportunities; (2) reinvented, geographically cohesive and decentralized field operations; and (3) the IRS’s need for a willingness to be more flexible with its seemingly rigid fixation upon robotically administered, all-digital and impersonal, taxpayer-service information technology (IT.) Let’s, therefore, start playing the always good game of Lost and Found! Lost—the people’s IRS: Found—We shall see! Nevertheless, none of this Rebuild IRS Initiative is intended to discount the value of numerous recent and praiseworthy IRS changes. Even so, without fresh nationally visible public outreach announcing gradual and non-disruptive structural change (as proposed herein), there are still too many uninspiring miles and years to go! No longer, generally speaking, silent, we speak out now because none of us IRS followers should have ever innocently overlooked, consciously dissed or accepted silently an IRS 1998, critically flawed, structural reorganization. In its fundamental design, with the programmed end of local IRS presence, it moved the Service further away from “We the People.” Compounding that setback, nowadays, we are also faced with the new prospect of the Service moving even further away with an overpoweringly robotic, IT-driven, all-digital IRS. Though a digital IRS, as a helpful option, may be even a great advance, all-digital is just another step backward; and we can do better! Besides, such a future state of affairs is even more worrisome since “all-digital” is apparently central to the IRS’s current, long-range planning (according to reports about what is commonly referred to as the IRS “Future State”)

New facts and old misconceptions about neuroses

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State-building, Systemic Shocks and Family Law in the Middle East and North Africa

Family law regulates the formation of marriage, divorce, marital property rights, child custody, inheritance, and spousal duties. This study aims to demonstrate how family law formation in the Middle East and North Africa reflects the struggle among social and political forces to capture the state and assert authority. The balance of power between competing social forces impacts both the timing (short-term versus long-term struggle) and type (progressive or regressive) of family law after independence. The ability of one of two competing forces, broadly categorized as traditionalist versus modernist, to capture the state is necessary for codification and is predictive of family law content. Case studies reveal that systemic shocks (e.g. revolution, social unrest, or foreign intervention) tip the balance of power in favor of traditional or modernizing forces in the post-independence state-building process and facilitate the successful consolidation of power and the codification of family law

Reasons Scientists Avoid Thinking about Ethics

Science is a powerful force for change in modern society. As the professionals at its helm, scientists have a unique responsibility to shepherd that change with thoughtful advocacy of their research and careful ethical scrutiny of their own behavior. In this paper, the author reviews some of the impediments that keeps scientists from taking ethical responsibility for their own work and the work in their institutions and fields of study

Beyond the “urge to move”: objective measures for the study of agency in the post-Libet era

The investigation of human volition is a longstanding endeavor from both philosophers and researchers. Yet because of the major challenges associated with capturing voluntary movements in an ecologically relevant state in the research environment, it is only in recent years that human agency has grown as a field of cognitive neuroscience. In particular, the seminal work of Libet et al. (1983) paved the way for a neuroscientific approach to agency. Over the past decade, new objective paradigms have been developed to study agency, drawing upon emerging concepts from cognitive and computational neuroscience. These include the chronometric approach of Libet’s study which is embedded in the “intentional binding” paradigm, optimal motor control theory and most recent insights from active inference theory. Here we review these principal methods and their application to the study of agency in health and the insights gained from their application to neurological and psychiatric disorders. We show that the neuropsychological paradigms that are based upon these new approaches have key advantages over traditional experimental designs. We propose that these advantages, coupled with advances in neuroimaging, create a powerful set of tools for understanding human agency and its neurobiological basis

Emerging Neurotechnologies for Lie Detection and the Fifth Amendment

The article examines the legal implications and advantages of emerging Neurotechnological Lie Detection (NTLD). The self-incrimination clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was taken into account, including its scope over NTLD. Key information about the reliability and privacy issues of NTLD is further presented

Monitoring and manipulating the human brain: new neuroscience technologies and their ethical implications

Discusses the use of new neuroscience technologies in monitoring and manipulating brain function, as of May 2004. History of modern brain imaging; Implications of neuroimaging for medical ethics; Factors that contributed to brain enhancement