Enabling Equity Assessments of Government Programs: Law, Policy, and Methods
Governments have increasingly mandated equity assessments for potential demographic disparities in programs and services. This talk will consider some of the legal, policy, and methodological challenges for carrying out such mandates, particularly in the public sector context. First, the talk will discuss emerging tensions between informational privacy and equity assessments, as illustrated by the data minimization principle under the Privacy Act of 1974. Second, it will discuss the range of methods available to improve disparity assessments, including imputation, record linkage, surveys, and form collection. Third, it will illustrate these tensions with a case study of an equity assessment of racial disparities of IRS tax audits.