IRS Issues Winter 2008 Statistics Of Income Bulletin

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

29 February 2008

The Internal Revenue Service on Thursday released the winter 2008 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin, featuring data from 134.4 million individual income tax returns filed for tax year 2005.

Of those returns, 90.6 million were “taxable”. This means that they reported total income tax greater than zero. The number of taxable returns in tax year 2005 was up 1.7% from 2004.

Adjusted gross income on these 90.6 million returns totaled USD6.857 trillion, an increase of 9.4% from 2004. Total income tax on these returns totaled USD935bn, up 12.4% from 2004. (Adjusted gross income is total income, as defined by the tax code, less statutory adjustments, which are primarily business, investment and certain other deductions.)

The average tax rate for taxable returns was 13.6% in tax year 2005, which was up 0.4 percentage points from 2004.

Taxpayers in the top 1% of adjusted gross income reported adjusted gross income of at least USD364,657 in tax year 2005. This group accounted for 21.2% of all adjusted gross income reported, which was up 2.2% from the prior year. This group also accounted for 39.4% of total income tax reported, which was up 2.5% from 2004.

Taxpayers in the top 5% of adjusted gross income reported adjusted gross income of at least USD145,283. This group accounted for 35.7% of all adjusted gross income reported and 59.7 percent of total income tax.

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