Utah Corporate Franchise Tax Data

The data in this publication give a fairly complete picture of the corporate franchise tax. Corporate income taxes are not only complicated by their logic, but also by their timing. The data reported in this report represent a snapshot of how the data stood for tax year 2003 in early 2005.

The detailed data in this report includes only data from C corporations, but the financial data in the historical section also includes other types of income in the corporate system, mainly S corporations.

A TECHNICAL DATA DESCRIPTION

For the majority of this report, the data is "Utah apportioned data," meaning that it has been multiplied by a factor that determines the Utah portion of a national figure for tax purposes. (More on apportionment will be found later.)

Since Utah has a minimum tax payment of $100 per taxable unit, some taxpayers pay a tax independent of their incomes. For this reason, we have divided the data into those that are minimum taxpayers and those that really are income-based payers.

We have reported some data by income class. The income used is "Utah taxable income.” For those who pay the minimum tax, we only have two divisions: those with no income (zero or less), and those with positive income. Those with positive income will generally have income less than $2,000. Multiple corporations that file together, however, can be minimum taxpayers, even with income over $2,000. For reasons of disclosure we have not reported their income in a more detailed way. (Examining the data tables will make this clearer.)

We have also reported the data according to a very broad sector breakdown (North American Industrial Classification,NAIC). In this presentation, the income classes are larger for disclosure reasons. The "no income”, "positive income," and “detailed income” classes have the same meaning as above.

In the data on apportionment, the income category is before apportionment, and the factors are weighted averages for class members, weighted by income before apportionment.