Figures for people whom don't file taxes?

Question

Anyone have some pseudo legit reference for the number of people who don't file / pay their federal taxes

Answer 1

The figures on non-compliance (also known as the "tax gap") are staggering. Here is an excerpt from an IRS study. For the whole article, see the link below.

Preliminary Findings on the Tax Gap
For Tax Year 2001, all taxpayers paid $1.767 trillion on time, a figure that represents from 83.4 percent to 85 percent of the total amount due. The 2001 tax gap, the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid on time is from $312 billion to $353 billion for all types of taxes.

Overall, the noncompliance rate is from 15 percent to 16.6 percent of the true tax liability. The old estimate, derived from compliance data for Tax Year 1988 and earlier, was 14.9 percent.

Late payments and other IRS enforcement and compliance efforts, including taxpayer audits and collection activities (payment arrangements, liens, levies and other legal actions) recover some of the Tax Gap. For Tax Year 2001, the IRS expects eventually to collect an additional $55 billion of the tax gap, reducing the net amount of the tax gap to between $257 billion and $298 billion.

Answer 2

US population: 300,000,000

People who don't file taxes:

children
elderly on fixed incomes
any adult with less than $8800 in income
illegal aliens who get paid under the table
prostitutes and drug dealers who get paid under the table
anyone working out of the country for long periods

It would be hard to track all of these groups. If you can find the total number of people who DO file returns, just subract from the total population.

You can also do some managing of the numbers. Go to the Census Bureau and find out the number of children under age 15 and subtract them out (the very small number of children who file on their own income is negligible).

If you can find individual sources on any of the others, that will add to the profile.

Answer 3

As an example more than 450,000 active and retired federal employees did not voluntarily comply with federal income tax requirements for the 2005 tax year. A good number of those worked for the IRS. I don't believe anyone really knows the number of people that do not file income tax return.

Answer 4

I didn't see the statistic you asked about at the link below. I didn't actually look very hard. The link is part of the IRS website. I think that qualifies as at least pseudo legit.