For the next few months, the Internal Revenue Service's Statistics of Income Division will be testing a prototype SOI Table Wizard.The tool will allow users to create their own custom tables from SOI tabulated data in the 1999 and 2000 Corporate Source Books. If adopted, data from other forms could eventually be added, and the IRS is asking users to provide feedback on the new feature. The agency also warned that there are some limitations in the tables.
The prototype Table Wizard is available at http://soitablewizard.altaplana.com/index.jsp.
Separately, the IRS released a fact sheet on the issue of income and how to determine gross income for a small business or self-employed taxpayer. A later fact sheet will provide information about a factor contributing to underreported income and overstated expenses.
The sheets were developed out of a compliance study of individual taxpayers for tax year 2001. The study involved random selection of about 46,000 returns for review. The largest component of the tax gap comes from unreported and underreported income, and the data suggested that more than $100 billion of the individual underreporting gap came from understated net business income.
