From Justin.P.Bryan@irs.gov Thu Oct 19 11:58:49 2017 Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 15:58:38 +0000 From: Bryan Justin P To: Daniel Feenberg Cc: Pierce Kevin K Subject: RE: data by state (fwd) I can't say for certain since I didn't work on the tables for those years, but the footnote for the ** says the data was omitted. I also can't find your specific example in the US table for 2000, but found a similar one below for Tax Year 2000. Child Tax 25,908,758 1,841 16,219 3,343,927 4,915,820 7,107,342 6,145,542 3,012,867 1,363,716 1,419 51 ** ** Credit 19,298,286 246 1,692 1,204,619 3,111,220 5,891,804 5,421,141 2,666,202 1,000,576 763 17 ** ** The AGI categories do not add up to the total, so it looks like the data was deleted, rather than collapsed but kept in the totals. So there should be at least two sets of ** in any category to avoid disclosure by subtraction. I'm not sure what year we started collapsing instead of deleting, but if the parts add up to the totals, then it is collapsed rather than deleted. If it is collapsed, our rule for collapsing cells for disclosure is to move them to the next available AGI category that is lower than the collapsed cell. So just to take your example below, they would all be included in the 8300 amount. Obviously there are some cases in which there is no lower AGI category to collapse into. In these cases, we would collapse into the nearest larger AGI category. So for example, if <$1 AGI needs to be suppressed it will be added to the $1-$10k category if available and if not, keeping moving up AGI categories until it can be added. I hope this answers all your questions. Kevin may be able to chime in if I missed anything or has more knowledge of past years that I don't. Justin -----Original Message----- From: Daniel Feenberg [mailto:feenberg@nber.org] Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2017 11:20 AM To: Bryan Justin P Cc: Pierce Kevin K Subject: RE: data by state (fwd) I sent this to Kevin by mistake earlier this morning. Sorry. dan feenberg ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 11:06:22 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Feenberg To: Pierce Kevin K Subject: RE: data by state In the State aggregate data from 1997 through 2004 suppressed fields were noted by "**" but I don't see an indication of where the suppressed amounts were included. Was it only in the total? If it was included in a nearby cell, how do I tell which cell? Please don't say "nearest" because of cases like this (from the US table for 2000): Education Credits Amount 54186 2 684 7039 8240 14036 15854 8300 ** ** ** 0 None of the suppressed cells can have been added to the top category (it's zero) but I don't know if they are only in the total or part of the field with $8,300,000. There are also cases where the lowest income cell is missing. Does it get added to the second lowest cell? Thanks Dan