Law Commons^™

A New Paradigm For Irs Guidance: Ensuring Input And Enhancing Participation, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

This article highlights how, in light of the increasing role that the IRS plays in the lives of poorer and marginalized individuals, when promulgating rules, the IRS will have to go beyond the mechanism of the APA notice and comment regime to ensure robust public participation. While others have discussed the IRS’s approach to the notice and comment regime, commentators generally have overlooked the problems associated with lower income taxpayers’ lack of voice in the rulemaking process. To remedy that shortfall, I call for changes in agency conduct to encourage public participation in formulating rules. I build upon a model …

Increasing Participation In The Rulemaking Process, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

Agency rulemaking has an immense impact on federal policymaking. The Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) paradigm of notice and comment is meant to provide a mechanism to allow for responsiveness and accountability to unelected agency officials who wield enormous power when promulgating general rules. This article centers on the insufficiency of notice and comment to provide both input to the IRS and legitimacy to the IRS’s actions when guidance touches on issues that are germane to lower income or disadvantaged taxpayers.

In this brief article, I build on administrative and poverty law scholars who have looked at the ways institutional proxies …