Church Stewardship Evaluation Information Requirements: A Pilot Study

There is a potential for financial abuse in church organizations. Large amounts of money are collected, performance is difficult to measure, and financial records and controls are often not as strong as in other not-for-profit organizations. Members/ donors of church organizations must be able to judge the financial stewardship of the organizations. Thus, financial statements for churches must include usable information and be in an understandable format. This study examines the appropriateness of two different types of financial statements: the GAAP format and a specialized church format.     

Toward a Regulatory Budget

A regulatory budget would require the federal government to treat compliance costs incurred by the private sector as if they were incurred by the government, without requiring the government to actually assume those costs. For example, EPA could be given a regulatory compliance budget of say $80 billion in FY98. A regulatory budget would provoke an annual debate in Congress on the size of EPA's or OSHA's budget. Such a debate would force the proponents to weigh the benefits and costs of various regulatory programs, something now lacking in the political process.
Interest in a regulatory budget reflects the slight gains in the quality of regulatory decision making resulting from mandatory regulatory review. It is now apparent that better information about the costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of regulation will not automatically improve regulatory decision making-although it would not hurt.     

The death-qualified jury and the defense of insanity

We predicted that people who are excluded from serving on juries in capital cases due to their opposition to the death penalty (excludable subjects) tend to place a greater value on the preservation of due process guarantees than on efficient crime control, and therefore are more likely to accept an insanity defense in criminal cases than are people who are permitted to serve on capital juries (death-qualified subjects). Subjects who had previously been classified as death-qualified or excludable read four summaries of cases in which the defendant entered a plea of insanity, and made judgments of guilt or innocence. In the two cases involving nonorganic disorders (schizophrenia), death-qualified subjects were significantly more likely than excludable subjects to vote guilty; in the two cases involving organic disorders (mental retardation and psychomotor epilepsy), there were no differences between the two groups. In addition, excludable subjects gave significantly higher estimates than death-qualified subjects of the proportion of defendants pleading insanity who really are insane.