Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA), whose home was recently raided as part of an FBI investigation to his ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, has resigned his seat on the House Appropriations Committee.

Rep. John Doolittle, whose house was searched by the FBI in an influence-peddling investigation, said Thursday he will step down temporarily from the House Appropriations Committee.

The announcement by the nine-term California Republican came one day after the disclosure that agents had raided his home in Oakton, Va. In the search last Friday, the FBI had a warrant for information connected with a fundraising business run by Doolittle's wife, Julie, that had done work for convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"I understand how the most recent circumstances may lead some to question my tenure on the Appropriations Committee," Doolittle wrote House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

While at his new job with the Red Cross, may he find redemption for the following:

• Implementing a program to privatize tax debt collection
• Privatizing regulations
• Offering early retirement to estate tax auditors
• Potentially politicizing tax collection (see OMB Watch's Advocacy Blog for more instances of potential politicization)
• Forcing TRAC to sue IRS to get tax data that shows how many corporate audits are cursory and unproductive

Oh, and for not really doing much to close the tax gap, though Congress never gave him a big enough budget to do anything significant.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson thinks we have no choice but to let people evade taxes, apparently. Having just paid my taxes, I find that a little annoying.

In testimony before Congress yesterday, Paulson made a case for restraint in closing the the tax gap, which is a sanitized way of putting the annual total of tax evasion, avoidance and errors (noncompliance, in tax speak). IRS estimates the tax gap to be at $353 billion a year, or about 16 percent of total taxes owed.

So why can't we go after this money? Here's Paulson:

"There is a big part of the tax gap that we simply won't be able to reach without adding draconian and painful requirements on all taxpayers," Paulson said.

All taxpayers? But not all taxpayers are noncompliant. Indeed, the IRS collects 99 percent of the taxes on income earned from wages and salaries. It's business income, and income from capital gains and dividends, that the IRS has trouble getting a hold of (See this EPI report for more).

So no, reducing noncompliance would not add any type of requirement for most taxpayers. Businesses and wealthy people would be most affected. That's who doesn't pay up.

But Paulson is right that this issue does affect all taxpayers- it's everyone that loses out when people don't pay their taxes. It's compliant taxpayers that in the long run have to pay more taxes to make up for what noncompliant taxpayers don't pay. It's everyone that could use more funding for education, or infrastructural investment, or solving our health care crisis. And it's everyone that has to pay for unnecessary deficit spending and debt.

Those "Draconian and painful" consequences that Paulson mentions are real, and they're already present. They're the consequences of not doing anything about the tax gap.

Check out this NYT article to find out how much people like you are being audited compared to other people.

And see the latest release by Syracuse University's TRAC, which had to sue the IRS to get data that shows that it has been strangely unproductive when it audits large corporations.

Via Think Progress, looks like the Office of Special Counsel has launched an investigation into GSA chief Lurita Doan's possible Hatch Act violations.

There was an interesting article in Government Executive magazine yesterday about measuring cost savings of federal jobs that are opened to public-private competitions. The specifics of the policies being developed by OMB and others within the federal government are quite complex, but one particular passage from the article references a statement from Office of Management and Budget Associate Administrator Mathew Blum that was moderately infuriating and still has me scratching my head:

"We recognize that this is not going to be a precise science," Blum said. "We do ourselves a disservice if we spend too much time arguing about the precise formula for savings." He said that cost and performance validation are important but costly, and OMB will be looking for data on a sampling of competitions, rather than on each one.

A sampling of competitions? So when OMB wants to evaluate regular government programs, it wastes excessive amounts of time, money, and energy making agency staff from every single government program wade through the ridiculous exercise of being surveyed under the Program Assessment Rating Tool (review a rundown of PART's flaws), but when there are private companies involved with doing public work for the government, we just need to use a handful of examples to evaluate whether Joe and Jane Taxpayer are getting the best value for the money. It's unclear to me why this isn't a pretty nasty double standard.

In weird sort of Zen meditation on the nature of oversight, the Department of Education overlooks a stark conflict of interest by selecting the company which implemented a billion-dollar reading program to evaluate the very program that it implemented. And the company in question has been criticized by the Ed. Dept.'s inspector general for failing to avoid conflict of interest problems when it originally implemented the program.

Reading First, part of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law, provides intense reading help to low-income children in the early elementary grades. RMC Research Corp. was hired to establish and implement the program starting in 2002, under three contracts worth about $40 million.

Recently, the Education Department's inspector general reported that RMC failed to keep the program free of conflicts of interest. For example, RMC did not screen subcontractors for relationships with publishers of reading programs.

Now, Reading First is in the midst of a congressionally mandated evaluation under a 2003 contract with a team that includes RMC, based in Portsmouth, N.H.

(h/t ThinkProgress)