New self-employed income info in 09 PUF

[Amy-Xu]

When I was working on a separated task, I happened to find there were two new variables in 09 PUF that haven't caught anyone's attention.

• e30400: total self-employment income subject to SS tax from schedule SE
• e30500: self-employment income subject to SS tax, secondary taxpayer

Thought this two variables might be able to provide a more accurate estimate on earning split, which currently we're using CPS imputations together with the sum of e00900 and e02100. Just curious what you think about this? @feenberg @martinholmer

[martinholmer]

Amy, This is a good find! Let's put this enhancement on a medium-priority track (rather than on a rush-priority track).

I see in the source code, that self-employment income included in the OASDI and HI tax base is the sum of e00900 (combined taxpayer and spouse Schedule C income) and e02100 (combined farm income).

I'm not very knowledgeable: what's the relationship between Schedule SE, on the one hand, and Schedule C and farm income, on the other hand?

cc @Amy-Xu @feenberg @MattHJensen

[feenberg]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2016, Martin Holmer wrote:

Amy, This is a good find! Let's put this enhancement on a medium-priority track (rather than on a rush-priority track).

I see in the source code, that self-employment income included in the OASDI and HI tax base is the sum of e00900 (combined taxpayer and spouse Schedule C income) and e02100 (combined farm income).

I'm not very knowledgeable: what's the relationship between Schedule SE, on the one hand, and Schedule C and farm income, on the other hand?

Some Schedule C and F income is reportable as wages, and some as property income. In taxcalc.sas we back out self-employment income from E09400, which is available every year:

if e09400 gt .153__ssmax{flpdyr} then _sey = (e09400 - .124_ssmax{flpdyr})/(.029.9235); else sey = e09400/(.153.9235);

_sey9235 = max(0,.9235*_sey);

Note that there are 2 places on the tax form for self-employment tax, one is the adjustment for one-half of self-employment tax (E3260) and the other is the amount owed (E09400). They are not always consistent, I don't know why that is.

dan

cc @Amy-Xu @feenberg @MattHJensen

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[martinholmer]

@Amy-Xu said on March 4, 2016, in Tax-Calculator issue #632:

When I was working on a separated task, I happened to find there were two new variables in 2009 IRS-SOI PUF that haven't caught anyone's attention.

e30400: total self-employment income subject to SS tax from schedule SE e30500: self-employment income subject to SS tax, secondary taxpayer

Thought this two variables might be able to provide a more accurate estimate on earning split, which currently we're using CPS imputations together with the sum of e00900 and e02100. Just curious what you think about this?

As I said at the time, this is a good find. And now, over a year later, these two variables are being used to construct two new variables in the puf.csv file and those variables are being used to compute more accurately the self-employment (payroll) tax. And we are also following your suggestion to use e30400 and e30500 to split other self-employment income. All these changes are in taxdata pull request 107 and taxcalc pull request 1438.

Thanks for pointing out the existence of these two PUF variables. Now that your suggestions have been implemented, I'm going to close this issue.

@MattHJensen @feenberg @andersonfrailey @hdoupe @codykallen