"The one thing I can tell you is that this is not what we intended," said J. Bennett Johnston, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana who had pushed for the original incentives that Congress passed in 1995.
The memorandums released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission show in detail how traders drove up prices in California when electricity supplies were tight, said Robert McCullough, an energy industry consultant in Portland, Ore ."Under the original incentives, it was in every player's interest to exacerbate an emergency," Mr. McCullough said.
Last summer, Garban executives said they wanted to expand Exco's original incentive deal to cover 700 employees who would remain in New York.
Chemical weapons expert Gwyn Winfield writes that Syria has an incentive to hold onto some of its chemical weapons, since its original incentive for developing a chemical weapons capability, as a deterrent against a suspected Israeli nuclear weapons arsenal, "isn't going to go away".
And finally, the CRC reporting regime also has the disadvantage of being part of a scheme companies consider to be nothing more than an overly complicated stealth tax, caused by complex compliance procedures and the unexpected clawback of the original revenue recycling incentive.
Asian original equipment manufacturers' incentive spending as a percent of the Big Three's total jumped 700 basis points year-over-year to about 42%, Merrill said.
They have also wrapped up a tonne of tools (VOIP, IM, SMS, video, you name it) and are giving it all away free (not that original) as an incentive to register, create a profile and start hocking your business.
But Burnett and TLC might have trouble securing a similarly-high tax credit from the state this time around: local Alaskan lawmakers are currently reviewing the original film production incentive, which was signed into law by Sarah Palin herself back in 2008, and will expire in 2013 unless it is renewed.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has acknowledged that the program "won't come close" to fulfilling its original expectations, that its incentives are not "powerful enough" and that the mortgage servicers are "still doing a terribly inadequate job".
Ten chronic conditions were included in the original scheme, with financial incentives ranging from £75 ($121 €955) to £4200 per indicator for the average practice in the first year, and rewards increased by 68% in the second year.
And the occasional cameo from the aged, although eerily unwrinkled, original cast is no incentive.
