IRS Announces Spring 2009 Statistics Of Income Bulletin

by Mike Godfrey, for LawAndTax-News.com, Washington

01 June 2009

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has announced the availability of the spring 2009 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, which features information on high-income individual income tax returns filed for tax year 2006.

According to the IRS, for tax year 2006, taxpayers filed nearly 4.1 million returns with adjusted gross income of USD200,000 (GBP122,000) or more, up from 3.6 million returns in the prior year. These high-income returns represent almost 3% of all returns filed for 2006.

The Statistics of Income (SOI) Division produces the SOI Bulletin on a quarterly basis. Articles included in the publication provide the most recent data available from various tax and information returns filed by US taxpayers.

This issue of the SOI Bulletin also includes articles on the following subjects:

• Foreign Earned Income Exclusion: In tax year 2006, about 335,000 US taxpayers living abroad reported approximately USD36.7bn (GBP22.3bn) in foreign-earned income and claimed nearly USD18.4bn (GBP11.2bn) in exclusions from income.
• Possessions Tax Credit: For tax year 2005, 102 US corporations claimed the possessions tax credit for income derived from business operations in US possessions. The total credit claimed was just less than USD1bn (GBP610m). Most corporations that claimed a possessions tax credit did so for operations in Puerto Rico, and those corporations claimed more than 98% of the total credit amount.
• Qualified Zone Academy Credit: Financial institutions claimed total tax credits of USD135m (USD82m) under the Qualified Zone Academy Bond program in tax year 2005, up from USD117m (GBP71m) in 2004.
• Filings of Individual Income Tax Returns: Taxpayers filed 143.0 million individual income tax returns for tax year 2007, an increase of 3.3% from the 138.4 million returns filed for 2006. Adjusted gross income increased 6.9% from 2006 to USD8.5 trillion (GBP5.1 trillion) for 2007, and taxable income rose 6.8% to USD5.9 trillion (GBP3.6 trillion). The alternative minimum tax increased 8.6% to USD20.9bn (GBP12.7bn), while total income tax rose 6.5% to USD1.1 trillion (GBP610bn).

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