FAMILY-BASED STATISTICS OF INCOME

This report represents an ongoing effort at the Utah State Tax Commission’s Economic and Statistical Unit to calculate family based data from individual returns. Since the data is based on tax returns and tax definitions of income, and since the aggregation is not perfect, this data should not be expected to conform to other sources of family or household data. This report groups returns into larger units, such as households or families. We group returns that show the same last name, ZIP Code, and first part of the address into a unit, generally a family. This method adds minors with their parents, if they use the same name and address. It also groups a married couple living with the husband's parents (same last name). However, it would not group a married couple living with the wife's parents (different last names).

This publication reports the data for the State, for counties, for cities and ZIP Codes. We have also included a table reporting mean and median incomes (AGI) for counties and for cities, using both a return approach and a Afamily@ approach.

THE COUNTY RESULTS

We believe the value of this report is in the detailed tables.Table 1 is a summary table and graph which compares the household perspective with the return perspective by county. The accompanying tables give, for the state as a whole, and for each county, both the number of returns filed with the IRS and the number of households our method yields. In addition, it reports per return and per household data for both adjusted gross income (AGI) and exemptions. For the state as a whole, the number of returns was about 25 percent higher than the number of households; thus the corresponding AGI was 25 percent greater than the return values. A quick glance at the table,reveals the largest differences were in Morgan, Davis, and Juab counties. The smallest differences were in Wayne, Daggett, and Piute counties. The median difference was 24%.