The Internal Revenue Service has released the spring 2015 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, which features preliminary data for individual income tax returns filed for tax year 2013, indicating that taxpayers were earning more income and relying less on unemployment insurance as the economy recovered from recession.
Articles included in the publication provide the most recent data available from various tax and information returns filed by U.S. taxpayers. The issue includes an
More than two-thirds of all taxpayers claimed the standard deduction, which accounted for 43 percent of total deductions. Total taxes and interest paid made up about 70 percent of all itemized deductions for the year.
A number of key components contributed to the growth in total adjusted gross income between 2012 and 2013, the IRS found. “The largest component of AGI, salaries and wages, increased 2.6 percent to $6,627.0 billion,” wrote Michael Parisi of the IRS. “The second largest component of AGI, taxable pensions and annuities, increased 4.6 percent to $651.9 billion. Another item related to retirement that increased was taxable Social Security benefits, which rose 9.2 percent to $245.4 billion. In contrast, taxable individual retirement arrangement (IRA) distributions decreased 6.8 percent to $213.6 billion.”
Several other components of AGI also decreased, particularly unemployment compensation, which dropped 27.0 percent to $52.2 billion. The IRS believes this was largely due to the decrease in the number of tax returns reporting taxable unemployment compensation, which decreased 18.0 percent to 9.4 million returns.
In addition, ordinary dividends dropped 19.6 percent to $190.7 billion, while net capital gains dropped 12.5 percent to $436.3 billion. However, capital gain distributions, a component of net capital gains, rose 156.8 percent to $45.2 billion. “Part of this large increase was attributable to distributions from U.S. mutual funds, which are required to distribute net realized capital gains, dividends, and interest earned to fund investors (taxpayers) in each year,” the IRS pointed out. “These year-end distributions were some of the largest since 2008.”
The SOI Bulletin also includes an
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The SOI Bulletin articles are available for download at