Behind Debt Deal: Silence, Distrust and Hardball [WSJ]
The budget fight that ended Wednesday night marked a new low in an increasingly dysfunctional capital. Interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers, congressional aides and administration officials about what transpired behind the scenes revealed that the traditional back-channel negotiations and 11th-hour bartering that produce most legislative deals didn't happen. Instead, both parties focused mostly on trying to kill any plans that emerged—both from the opposing party and their own colleagues.
Republican Civil War Erupts: Business Groups v. Tea Party [Bloomberg]
“We are going to get engaged,” said Scott Reed, senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “The need is now more than ever to elect people who understand the free market and not silliness.”
Study Says Results Improve When Auditors Cut Ties [CW]
A group of academics out of MIT and Harvard have published the results of a two-year study on environmental audits for industrial plants in India after regulators there decided to change the way auditors are engaged and compensated to check a plant's compliance with environmental and pollution standards. The India state of Gujarat wanted to end the conflict of interest inherent when a company hires and pays its own external auditor. The study looked at audit results for companies that continued to retain their audit firms and compared them to outcomes where auditors were assigned randomly to plants and paid fixed amounts out of a common pool. The study found the status quo audit system appeared to be corrupt, with auditors “systematically underreporting the pollution emissions of control plants at levels just below the regulatory standard,” the authors wrote. The more random, fixed-fee audits, on the other hand, led to more truthful audit reports and a reduction in the percentage of plants that were falsely reported as compliant with pollution standards.
Shutdown Forces IRS to Delay PTIN Renewals for 2014 [AWEB]
[shaking fist]
JCT: Corporate Tax Falls Partly on Labor [TF]
They've settled on 25%.
The Truth About Bad Bosses [At Work/WSJ]
"A bad boss can help you become a great manager because you learn how you don’t want to be.”
BART strike underway (again) in San Francisco [CSM]
So that's fun.
Bourbon heist | Pappy Van Winkle stolen in apparent inside job [CCJ]
Roughly 65 cases of 20-year-old Pappy Van Winkle bourbon were stolen in what looks to be an inside job from a secure area at Buffalo Trace Distillery’s Frankfort facility, according to Franklin County Sheriff Pat Melton. Melton said the theft was reported Tuesday and appears to have occurred over the past couple months. Detectives are investigating but have no suspects. The thief or thieves made off with about $26,000 of the limited stock, which Melton said consists of about $25,350 in 3-bottle cases of 20-year-old Pappy and about $675 in nine cases of 13-year-old Van Winkle Family Reserve rye.
