Electronic Dissemination of Internal Revenue Service Locality Data

• Activity Number: 112
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 12, 2002 : 12:00 PM to 1:50 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Government Statistics*
• Author(s): Emily Gross*+
• Affiliation(s): Internal Revenue Service
• Keywords: Administrative Records ; Migration ; Electronic Dissemination

Abstract

The Statistics of Income (SOI) Division of the IRS offers several income tax data products in electronic format. While some of these products are electronic versions of SOI publications, others cannot be found in any published materials. By far, the most popular of these types of data are individual taxpayer data by geographical area. The tables offered through SOI include: Individual Income and Tax Data by State and Size of Adjusted Gross Income, County Income Data, County-to-County Migration Data, State-to-State Migration Data, and ZIP Code Area Data. Some of these tables are available on our website as downloadable spreadsheet files, while others are disseminated by CD-ROM or e-mail. This paper will describe the types of locality income data the IRS offers, the electronic formats available, the years covered by the data, and the sources and limitations. Practical applications of the data will be shown, as well as some interesting ongoing studies by some of our customers. Finally, some innovations for the future will be highlighted as the IRS plans to make its statistics even more readily available to the thousands of citizens who download our files each year.