Using the Statistics of Income Division’s Sample Data To Reduce Measurement and Processing Error in Small-Area Estimates Produced from Administrative Tax Records

T he approximately 133 million tax records on the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) Individual Returns Transaction File have several uses to multiple government agencies. In particular, these data serve as the sampling frame for the Statistics of Income (SOI) Division of IRS, as well as a source of popula-tion data for other tabulations. For example, SOI pub-lishes tabulated monetary amounts and the associated number of returns by State and Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) categories using these data (Table 2 in eac