We analyze a randomized experiment in which 14,000 tax filers in H&R Block offices in St. Louis received matches of zero, 20 percent, or 50 percent of IRA contributions. Take-up rates were 3 percent, 8 percent, and 14 percent, respectively. Among contributors, contributions, excluding the match, averaged $765 in the control group and $1100 in the match groups. Taxpayer responses to similar incentives in the Saver's Credit are much smaller. Taxpayers did not game the experiment by receiving a match and strategically withdrawing funds. Tax professionals significantly influenced contribution choices. These results suggest that both incentives and information affect behavior. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

OIG's staff of more than 1,500 professionals carry out this mission through a nationwide network of audits, evaluations, investigations, and enforcement and compliance activities. Our mission encompasses more than 300 programs administered by HHS. In accordance with OIG's statutory funding allocations, we direct the majority of our resources toward safeguarding the Medicare and Medicaid programs and the health and welfare of their beneficiaries. While HHS programs continue to grow in size, scope, and complexity, the dedicated efforts of OIG's professional staff, in collaboration with our government partners, have yielded notable accomplishments in program savings, program integrity and efficiency, and quality of care.At a time when the programs administered by HHS are becoming increasingly important to all Americans, it is essential that meaningful actions are taken to enhance the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of HHS programs. Simultaneously, we must continue to vigilantly monitor HHS programs and operations to ensure that valuable taxpayer resources are not being diminished by fraud, waste, or abuse.In FY 2008, OIG's contributions to safeguarding HHS programs from threats of fraud, waste, and abuse and to promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in HHS programs included:

No abstract

No abstract

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2:2004 3. Domestic investment represents the accumulation of assets in a country by both its own residents and foreigners. Net foreign investment is the accumulation of assets abroad by residents less the accumulation of assets in the home country by foreigners. The sum of the two is just the accumulation of assets, by residents, in the home country and abroad. This sum must equal national saving. 104 Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2:2004 5. The unified budget is not recorded entirely on a cash-flow basis, and so the unified deficit does not precisely match the increase in debt held by the public. For example, only the subsidy cost of direct loan transactions is now recorded in the unified budget. The government must, however, finance the full value of the loan. This factor causes the unified budget deficit to be smaller than the increase in debt held by the public. 10. CBO, "The Economic and Budget Outlook," January 2004. 11. See Auerbach and others (2003) for an extended discussion of these issues. 12. See Gale and Orszag (2003b) for further discussion of the expiring provisions, and Gale and Orszag (2004a) on the effects of making the tax cuts permanent. 13. See Burman, Gale, and Rohaly (2003) for discussion of AMT projections and trends. 14. Another concern is that the baseline holds real discretionary spending constant over time. In a growing economy with an expanding population and evolving security needs, this assumption is not credible. But the September 2004 projections contain offsetting biases for discretionary spending that roughly cancel out. In particular, the baseline includes the recent supplemental spending authority for military expenditures in Iraq, which is unlikely to persist for an entire decade. Removing the supplemental and adjusting the spending level for population results in a ten-year outlay total that is about the same as that in the baseline, and so we simply adopt the official baseline figures for discretionary spending. 16. See Auerbach (1994). Over an infinite planning horizon, the requirement is equivalent to assuming that the debt-GDP ratio does not explode. Alternatively, the adjustments set the present value of all future primary surpluses equal to the current value of the national debt, where the primary surplus is the difference between revenue and noninterest expenditure. 17. Auerbach, Gale, and Orszag (2004). In perhaps more familiar terms, the primary deficit would be 4.