Improving the timeliness, accessibility, and usefulness of tax data
USAFacts evaluates IRS tax data and offers independent, expert-informed recommendations to make tax statistics timelier, easier to access, and AI-ready.
Each year, the Statistics of Income (SOI) Division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) publishes statistics on a range of tax topics, including tax rates, tax credits and deductions, corporate taxes, income, and more. By collecting over 160 million individual income tax returns each year in addition to corporate tax returns, W-2s for wage and salary workers, 1099s for self-employment income, 990s from nonprofits, and various other tax forms, the IRS sits on one of the richest sources of data in the United States. However, SOI’s data products are challenging to navigate and can be delayed multiple years. Additionally, SOI does not publish key data that the IRS collects.
Making tax data timelier and more accessible would enable lawmakers and the public to better understand the taxes Americans pay as well as the effects of changes to the tax code. Now that policymakers have enacted major tax policy changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), reforms to SOI are needed to ensure people receive timely data to assess the effects of the law.
Over the past year, USAFacts identified opportunities to strengthen access to SOI tax data. This involved independently assessing SOI’s data products and interviewing a range of tax experts, data users, and statisticians, including tax economists, policy analysts, and IRS data officials. In this report, we provide an overview of our research findings and recommendations to improve access to tax data.
