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IRS Posts Enlightening Income Statistics

The Internal Revenue’s quarterly Statistics of Income Bulletin typically provides some interesting data, and the winter 2012 issue is no exception.

For example, in the lead article, the IRS found that taxpayers filed 140.5 million returns for tax year 2009. Of those, nearly 82 million (or 58 percent) were taxable, that is they had total income tax greater than $0. That represents the lowest percentage of taxable returns in more than 24 years. The number of taxable returns was 9.7 percent lower than for 2008, one sign of the financial crisis that began that year. The adjusted gross income reported on the taxable returns was almost $6.8 trillion, while total income tax was $866 billion.

Other articles in the bulletin include one on split-interest trusts. It noted that charitable remainder trusts, charitable lead trusts and pooled income funds reported $8 billion in gross income and $121.2 billion in end-of-year assets for filing year 2010.

On the subject of domestic private foundations, the IRS found that for tax year 2008, domestic private foundations reported $526.5 billion in total assets and $49.7 billion in total revenue. These foundations distributed $42.8 billion in contributions, gifts and grants to the charitable sector.

Also on the subject of nonprofits, another article covers unrelated business income tax returns for tax-exempt organizations. For tax year 2008, tax-exempt organizations filed more than 42,000 unrelated business income tax returns and reported $10.3 billion in gross unrelated business income. 

In the area of personal wealth, the IRS found that in 2007, an estimated 2.3 million U.S. adults had gross assets of $2 million or more, holding more than $12 trillion in combined net worth.

While much of the information is about tax years past, the IRS also made some projections of federal tax return filings. The IRS expects that over 239 million tax returns will be filed during calendar year 2012, of which more than 145 million will be from individuals.

The Statistics of Income Bulletin is available for download at www.IRS.gov/taxstats.

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