In her piece “How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece”, Chana Joffe-Walt describes the efforts of Diomidis Spinellis to retrieve taxes owed to the Greek government, the lack of which has forced Greece into its current debt crisis. This article shows an excellent example of how technocrats are hampered by factors outside of the domain of the problem they are addressing. You can create accountability, but without a sense of responsibility coming from local culture, this approach is doomed to fail.

Overseas Exile caught this one in his writeup of a provision that was slipped into a jobs bill at the end of last year. The New York Times writes

Legislation meant to help the United States government locate overseas assets of American tax cheats created little stir when it was quietly slipped into a jobs bill last year.

But the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or Fatca, as it is known, is now causing alarm among businesses outside the United States that fear they will have to spend billions of dollars a year to meet the greatly increased reporting burdens, starting in 2013. American expatriates also say the new filing demands are daunting and overblown.

As pointed out by the above, this will likely mean that foreign banks will simply not deal with US citizens as a result since the costs of maintaining accounts will be too high due to the costs of compliance and potential penalties.