What kind of refund can the average filer expect? How dangerous do people believe it is to do their own taxes? How many people cheat? Where does all the money go? Some numbers help answer these and other questions.
50.6 Percentage of your federal income taxes that goes to funding national defense and health care, per a new federal taxpayer receipt calculator, which allows you to plug in your numbers to see exactly how much of your tax money is used for these and other programs and services.
4 in 10 Ratio of people who, in a recent OfficeMax survey, said they believed cutting their own hair was less dangerous than filing their own taxes.
11 Number of different schemes employed by the wealthy to avoid paying taxes, as suggested by BusinessWeek.
3 Number of years actor Wesley Snipes was sentenced to serve in prison for not filing tax returns.
15 Percentage of Americans who said they were likely to cheat on their taxes, per a recent DDB Life Style Study. Well over half of those saying they’d cheat were men (64%), and they were likely to be single and under age 45. (Oh, and it turns out DDB was actually a front for the IRS, the survey wasn’t anonymous, and everybody who admitted to cheating was busted. Kidding! Wouldn’t that be funny if that was the case, though?)
40 In a recent study, butchers and bakers were found to understate their incomes by 40%, on average, in order to avoid paying more in taxes. This group of workers ranked highest on those likely to understate income.
74 Percentage of Americans who say a lot of their tax dollars are wasted.
Over $3,000 The average refund received this tax season.
$54,000 The tax refund one North Carolina family will receive this year because of credits related to their adopting five children over a three-year span.
$65,934 Amount spent on prostitutes by one lawyer in New York that he tried to deduct from his taxes as medical “services.”
$1,175,422,000,000 Amount collected by the IRS from 144,103,375 individual income tax returns for the 2009 tax year. That breaks down to an average of a little over $8,157 per return, though some filers pay less and some pay much, much more.