donboyd5
commented
1 week ago @nikhilwoodruff
For completeness, here's the linkage between puf variables and the variable names I've given to IRS targets in the "potential_targets.csv" file:
- e18400 -- maps to id_pitgst (itemized deductions for personal income tax and general sales tax)
- e18500 -- maps to id_retax (itemized deductions for real estate tax)
And also, the number of returns with each item (pseudocode):
- (e18400 ~= 0) * s006 -- maps to nret_id_pitgst
- (e18500 ~= 0) * s006 -- maps to nret_id_retax
MaxGhenis
nikhilwoodruff
martinholmer
@nikhilwoodruff, FYI @martinholmer
As mentioned on the phone today, I think tax-microdatabenchmarking currently maps the PUF SALT variable e18400 incorrectly to IRS-published total SALT rather than to the combined PIT-sales tax SALT component. However it is more complicated than I realized at the time; here are full details.
The PUF 2015 documentation (p.8) lists relevant variables as follows:
On page A-7 it shows the variables on 2015 Schedule A:
e18400 is combined PIT and sales tax, while e18500 is real estate taxes.
On page 48 the PUF 2015 documentation gives us ERRONEOUS NUMBERS FOR (1) the official IRS totals for these variables in the column 2015 Full SOI Individual Sample ($35.270 billion and $18.861 billion), and (2) what we should expect for weighted sums in the 2015 PUF, including the 4 aggregate records in the column 2015 Public Use Sample (rounding to the same numbers as the full sample). These numbers are wrong and appear to be missing a digit.
The correct numbers for the Full Sample are in the IRS file 15in14ar.xls, in BT10 and BY10, which are $352.701 billion and $188.606 billion (the PUF 2015 documentation appears to have several other missing-digit errors for other itemized deductions, so caveat emptor):
This tells us the proper mapping and approximately what we should expect if we summarize the 2015 PUF and we don't exclude the 4 aggregate records.
Now that we know the proper mapping, we can worry about how to target the PUF in 2021. Here are the IRS published totals for 2021, from 21in14ar.xls:
So we should target 2021 values for filers for e18400 of $258.640 billion and for e18500, $99.984 billion.
I have updated my IRS targets repo to include the distributional detail. The data folder includes an updated potential_targets.csv file with separate variables id_pitgst (itemized deductions PIT and general sales tax), idretax (real estate tax), and their number-of-returns counterparts nret....