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Nearly 250 Million Tax Returns Filed in 2016

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: January 3, 2016 9:02 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 3:31 pm

, 249,775,500 tax returns will be filed in the governments fiscal 2016. That is an exact number, but it is the IRS.

Over 165 million of these filings will be electronic. Deforestation activists get a break

Over 145 million will come from individuals. Over 3.7 million will be from partnerships. Over 6.7 million will come from corporations, among them are those activists and politicians complain about because they are corporations which pay no taxes (These companies argue that they make payroll tax contributions, but that debate is for another time)

What the IRS does not say is whether all of the electronic returns from individuals and corporations help it monitor whether returns are accurate. The IRS chiefs complain each year that they do not have the resources to monitor cheaters. Is it easier to cheat on paper than it is electronically? No IRS data on that, at least not for the public
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All of this data comes from IRS projections, which the agency admits are not as accurate as they seem at first blush:

The table presents two measures of projection accuracy; the mean absolute percent error (MAPE) and the number of over-projections. The MAPE is computed as the average percent projection error regardless of whether they were over- or under projections over the four projection cycles. The number of over-projections can show whether projections are consistently over- or under- projected. A value of two indicates balanced forecasts over the four cycles. The table groups these two measures by time horizon. The time horizon is determined by when the forecast was made and for what future year. For example, a forecast for 2012 made in 2009 would be part of the “3-years-ahead” time horizon.

If the IRS can under-project the number of tax returns to be filed, how can it know if the actual filings each years are what they should be or not? The IRS does not have enough employees, it says, so not enough to even count for accuracy.