[UPDATED Annually — Last update March 27, 2026]
In “The Tax Deception”, one of the things mentioned often, is the “IRS Collections Data.” This data is drawn from published IRS spreadsheets that, at the time of publication of the book, cover the 2001 through 2020 tax years. Links to that data are provided in the book. However, that data changes every year and it can be difficult to wade through 20 or more years of data. So, for reader convenience, in this and future years, we are providing here, just the data from the most recently reported tax year. At this time, the data on this page is for the 2023 tax year.
We try to update this page each year, as the IRS releases the each year’s collections data spreadsheets. Unfortunately, the IRS does not release this data on a specific schedule. Therefore, we have to go searching for it on a schedule. As a result, it could take us a few days to find the updated files and extract the data to be displayed on this page, each year. We appreciate your patience.
All but the bottom row of this table is drawn from an IRS spreadsheet based on descending cumulative percentiles. The information in the bottom row is taken from a related IRS spreadsheet that is based on ascending cumulative percentiles. Links to both spreadsheets can be found at the bottom of this page.
The source spreadsheets used in compiling this table can be found in the following links.
IRS Collections Represented in Descending Cumulative Percentiles:
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/23in41ts.xls
IRS Collections Represented in Ascending Cumulative Percentiles: