The 2020 IRS Data Book

The IRS releases each year a data book that summarizes the amount of income, payroll, excise, estate and other taxes collected during the fiscal year ended September 30.

They just release the latest Data Book for FYE September 30, 2020.  The book has some interesting facts as follows:

• The IRS collected a total of $3.493 trillion of taxes which was the second highest total of all time.  The year before, they collected $3.565 trillion.
• The major breakdown of taxes is as follows:
  • Business income taxes – $264 billion,
  • Individual, estate and trust income taxes – $1.871 trillion,
  • Employment taxes, primarily FICA – $1.257 trillion,
  • Estate and gift taxes – $18 billion, and
  • Excise taxes – $72 billion

As you can see, individuals pay almost 90% of the taxes collected during the year and almost 40% of those collections are payroll taxes.

The figures above are gross collections.  The IRS also issued refunds of about $736 billion bringing net collections to about $2.757 trillion.

The number of returns filed are as follows:

• C corporation returns – 1.819 million (down from 2.146 million in 2019),
• S corporation returns – 5.044 million (down from 5.187 million in 2019),
• Partnership returns – 4.470 million (up from 3,946 million in 2019),
• Individual returns – 157.195 million (up from 154.094 million in 2019),
• Estate and Trust income tax returns – 2.82 million (down from 3.116 million in 2019),
• Estate tax returns – 15,023 (down from 25,742 in 2019).

It appears that tax reform may have converted many C and S corporations over to partnerships (at least based simply on number of returns filed).

As expected, California had the largest number of total returns filed at 29.724 million with Texas second at 19.749 million and Florida third at 17.465 million.  New York was the only other state over 10 million at 15.722 million returns filed.

1989 was the first year where collections exceeded $1 trillion, then year 2000 it exceeded $2 trillion and finally in 2014, total collections exceeded $3 trillion.  If that trend continues, we will exceed $4 trillion in 2028 (unless we exceed it next year with estimated tax changes that may occur this year).

The IRS website (IRS.gov) had 1.6 billion visitors and they viewed 9.225 billion pages.  Over 505 million inquiries were on ‘Where’s My Refund”.

About half of the Data Book deals with their examination efforts.  Too much detail was provided to allow for a good summary.

There are over 13 million taxpayers that are delinquent with their taxes and total net collections for 2020 was about $38.464 billion.

The IRS assessed total civil penalties of $31.370 billion but also abated civil penalties of about $23.881 billion.

The Data Book has a trove of data that us Tax Geeks will find interesting but we tried to summarize data that might be interesting for non-tax geeks.