IRS Taxpayer Burden Surveys

Each year, individual taxpayers in the United States submit more than 140 million tax returns to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS uses the information in these returns, recorded on roughly one hundred distinct forms and supporting schedules, to administer a tax system whose rules span thousands of pages. Managing such a complex and broad-based tax system is costly but represents only a fraction of the total burden of the tax system. Equally, if not more burdensome, is the time and out-of-pocket expenses that taxpayers spend in order to comply with tax laws and regulations. Changes in tax regulations, tax administration, tax preparation methods, and taxpayer behavior continue to alter the amount and distribution of taxpayer burden. The purpose of these surveys is to gather data that will be used to update and expand the IRS Taxpayer Burden Model, a robust predictive model based on an improved burden estimation methodology. Information gathered by the surveys is not available in the administrative tax return data, so survey data are a critical input to the model. The survey data are not viewed discretely. Rather, because the data are used as inputs to the Taxpayer Burden Model, they provide an end-to-end, taxpayer facing view of compliance burden. The related behavioral studies further inform IRS’s understanding of taxpayer behavior, inform burden model design, and help IRS improve processes and identify opportunities to reduce taxpayer burden.

The latest form for IRS Taxpayer Burden Surveys expires 2026-07-31 and is listed under ICR 202303-1545-007.

2019 Individual Taxpayer Burden Survey (Data collection 6/1/2020-5/31/2021)

Federal Enterprise Architecture: General Government - Taxation Management