What Happened?
The tax rules that touch your wallet are being written with numbers that are years out of date. Policymakers currently lack IRS data for tax years 2023, 2024 and 2025, according to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report published Sept. 21 that maps the tax statistics available to lawmakers. The IRS publishes detailed tax statistics broken down by state, congressional district, county, and ZIP code, but most of that data arrives on a three-year delay. As of the report's publication, the most recent subnational figures cover tax year 2022, released in late February 2025.
Lawmakers lack IRS data for tax years 2023, 2024 and 2025 because of a three-year publication lag, and the most recent subnational tax data covers tax year 2022, according to a Congressional Research Service report.
Why Does it Matter to Me?
When Congress debates tax cuts, credits, or new rules, it relies on IRS data to estimate who benefits and who pays. A three-year lag means any bill moving through Congress today is being scored against economic conditions from 2022, before recent inflation, interest rate changes, and job market shifts took hold.
The IRS received filings covering about 214 million adults for tax year 2022, while the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the adult population at over 257 million, leaving a gap of roughly 43 million adults not captured in IRS data because many individuals are not required to file individual income tax returns.
Both Sides, Now
The report flags several limits in the data: some Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estate tax year-of-death files are mislabeled and hosted in the wrong location on the IRS website, which creates navigation challenges for researchers and staff, while tax data is assigned to geographic areas by the address on the return, which may not reflect a taxpayer's actual residence, and congressional district assignment relies on ZIP codes, which can introduce imprecision.
Federal law also limits what the IRS can publish: income figures from fewer than 20 returns in a local area are excluded from published tables to protect taxpayer privacy. At the state level, the threshold drops to fewer than 10 returns.
Under a federal confidentiality law, the IRS leaves income items with fewer than 20 returns in a local area out of its published tables, and it applies a similar exclusion when a state-level item has fewer than 10 returns.
What Happens Next?
The IRS tracks population movement through year-to-year address changes on tax returns, producing inflow and outflow data by state and county with a two-year delay. For now, the gap remains. Any major tax legislation that clears Congress before new IRS data arrives will be built on figures that predate the economic turbulence of the past three years.
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