Unbundling the 'dead weight losses' of regulation

At the launch of the evaluation an audience member -- a distinguished economist, as it happens -- called for unbundling the useful parts of regulations from the parts that generate sheer 'dead-weight loss'.  He sent along this brief summary of his point:

In deriving policy implications it is important to try to separate the "cost of doing business"  into two components:
* a cost to the firm that has a countervailing benefit to the rest of society ---  for example, taxes paid that are received by the treasury , costs of registry that are necessary to finance a well functioning and transparent registry, etc.
  versus
* a cost that basically finances a transfer, such as briberies to tax officials , excessive cost of firm registration far above the one necessary to finance a good system,etc. These costs are in the nature of dead weight losses.
I believe your evaluation implicitly tried to recognize this distinction. 

Obviously this unbundling is not easy empirically, particularly for large cross-country comparisons. Most will require a deeper case by case approach. However, for taxation, it may be possible to identify what part of the 'cost of paying taxes'  represents side payments to officials because firms actually have that information. It would be interesting  to rank countries by this indicator of 'dead weight loss'.