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Ponder this: About 80% of above 50 years of ages will get lower than £155 weekly. It was inevitable that some will win and some will lose when the fresh flat-rate weekly state pension of £155 was applied. The Government had vowed it would not cost the nation more than that. Hence, if several individuals will end up getting much more than the present state payout of £113.10, surely the extra money would have to come from other sources. But the announcement has been consistently clear: Anyone who has paid the amount required by the National Insurance of 35 years of contributions will receive a weekly pension of £155. However, our evaluation of the small print on the new flat-rate has shown this to be untrue. About 80% of over-50-year-old citizens who have faithfully paid their regular National Contributions all their life will end up receiving below £155 each week. Why? Because at a certain time they were in a final-salary program and were contracted out of the State Second Pension - a plan that permitted employees to jack-up their state retirement payout. Since they chose out of these extra payments, workers were allowed to pay a lower rate of National Insurance contributions of 10.6% and not 12%. The justification from the present Government is that these workers should not receive or claim the new higher basic state retirement pay for having paid lower tax then. This is in spite of the fact that, in the present administration, they would have been eligible for the full amount of basic state pension.

Investigations of the IRS are taking place not only in Congress but also in court. One case, which has developed slowly since it was filed in 2010, reveals much about both the long reach of the agency and the interwoven nature of the broader federal bureaucracy. Defending IRS commissioner John Koskinen against the claims of the pro-Israel group Z Street is Andrew Strelka - and before joining the Department of Justice's civil-trial section, Strelka worked at the IRS for Lois Lerner, who was then the agency's head of exempt organizations. As it happens, this is the very IRS division at which the mistreatment of Z Street is alleged to have occurred - and Strelka worked there at the very time Z Street's application for tax-exempt status was being considered. Scott Coffina, a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm Drinker Biddle & Reath and a former Justice Department prosecutor says Strelka's representation could violate Washington, D.C.'s rules of professional conduct for lawyers in "several" ways, in particular the rule that prohibits a lawyer from representing a client in a matter where "The lawyer's professional judgment on behalf of the client will be or reasonably may be adversely affected" by his personal interests. "If Mr. Strelka was involved in the targeting of conservative groups," Coffina says, "it is hard to imagine that he can give dispassionate advice. He would have a tough time evaluating the merits of the plaintiff's case and advising his client on strategies in the litigation. He seems to have a personal conflict of interest."