WASHINGTON -- Guess what the odds are of the Internal Revenue Service auditing a tax filer living in the Rocky Mountain region (including Utah)?
A little less than 1 in 200.To be exact, 0.49 percent of the region's returns filed in 1998 had district (face-to-face) audits. That's the lowest ever and was the 14th lowest of the IRS's 33 districts. But it's still a bit higher than the national average of 0.46 percent.
The possibly comforting news for taxpayers comes from a study of IRS data gathered in 1998 and released Monday by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
The study includes a bevy of other data about how states and counties rank on everything from income to the number of exemptions that their residents claim -- just in time for last-minute filers to compare data on their 1998 returns with others.
For example, Utah taxpayers -- thanks to their large average family sizes -- appear to lead the nation in the number of tax exemptions they claim for themselves and dependents.
Utah has only 29 counties -- but 18 appear on a list of the top 50 counties nationally where taxpayers claim the most tax exemptions, according to TRAC. The nation has 3,042 counties.
Millard County was No. 1 in the nation -- with residents claiming an average of 3.18 exemptions per return. Second in the nation was Emery County with 3.1 per return.
Other Utah counties in the top 50 included Beaver, Box Elder, Daggett, Davis, Duchesne, Juab, Morgan, Piute, Rich, San Juan, Sanpete, Sevier, Uintah, Utah, Wasatch and Wayne.
In another top 50 list, Summit County -- home of the posh Park City area ski resorts -- finished 19th highest in the nation among the 3,042 counties for the average adjusted gross income reported by its filers in 1997: $64,917.
That's also a whopping $20,000 higher than the second-highest average income per filer reported in any Utah county: $44,795 in Davis County. (It's also nearly three times the lowest average reported in any Utah county: $22,888 in Piute.)
Tooele County made one "bottom 50" list: Its tax filers finished worst among all counties in how much interest they reported making from investments: $627.
Some other data of interest includes:
While relatively few filers are audited in the Rocky Mountain region, those who are tend to pay big.
They paid an extra $12,575 on average in extra taxes and penalties, according to 1997 data. That's the third highest among the IRS's 33 districts. The Rocky Mountain region includes Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.
The region where filers are most likely to be audited is northern California, where 1.08 percent of all filers are audited. The Ohio region has the lowest rate: 0.22 percent of all filers.
The higher the income, the more likely a filer is to be audited. Nationally, 0.46 percent of all filers are audited -- but 1.13 percent of people reporting incomes of more than $100,000 are audited.
Corporations are more likely than residents to be audited. Nationally, 2.04 percent of all corporate filers were audited. The largest corporations -- those with assets of $250 million or more -- had an audit rate of 37.27 percent.
The average income reported by Utah filers was $39,690, putting residents (on average) in the relatively lofty 13th percentile of all filers.