Don’t Mess With Taxes

Tax changes have been the big news story this month. And taxes have changed on PolicyMap as well. But it has nothing to do with the fiscal cliff.

For a long time, PolicyMap has had tax return data from two sources. The first was directly from the IRS’s Statistics of Income (SOI) database. The second was from the IRS, but through the Brookings Institution. These offer similar, but distinct types of data on tax returns.

Sadly, the IRS stopped updating its zip-code level SOI database, and the last tax year of data available was from 2007. It was a good dataset, and served PolicyMap with flying colors (mostly shades of purple). But sometimes, you have to know when to say goodbye. And so, due to the data’s obsolescence, we’ve removed it from PolicyMap. I’ll give you a moment to find a tissue. If the IRS ever starts releasing this data again, rest assured, back on PolicyMap it will go.

But don’t worry! There are still taxes! We still have IRS tax return data from the Brookings Institution. When you go to the Money & Income menu to get tax return data, all the data there is from Brookings.

There have been some changes to the Brookings data, and we’ll cover those in a future blog post.