Improving Cbos Methodology For Projecting Individual Income Tax Revenues

In preparing its annual report on the budget outlook, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects revenues from the fed. individual income tax. This paper discusses two possible ways to use info. about tax collections to improve projections of tax receipts: Explicitly using the info. provided by recent tax collections to adjust the projections, and basing the projections on multiple years of info. from tax returns rather than relying on just the most recently available year. The results of this analysis suggests that combining the two approaches that is, using the info. from recent tax collections and relying on multiple years of tax return info. can modestly improve the near-term projection of individual income tax revenues. A print on demand report.