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   WASHINGTON, D.C. - Turnover in the group of the top 400 taxpayers is extremely high, according to new tax data obtained by the Joint Economic Committee and released today by Vice Chairman Jim Saxton. Although changes in the income and taxes of the 400 highest income (adjusted gross income) taxpayers for years 1992-2000 have been reported as front page news in recent days, such comparisons are essentially meaningless because the membership of this group changes so dramatically every year. According to the new data, of 400 top tax returns in tax years 1992-2000, 75.7 percent would not have been among the top 400 more than once. Even more tellingly, less than one percent of the members of the top 400 were among this group every year from 1992 to 2000.

   "The figures I am releasing today shed new light on the turnover of the affluent taxpayers recently studied by the IRS," Saxton said. "Although there was some evidence that turnover in this group is quite high, the new numbers obtained from the IRS portray even greater mobility. These data provide yet another example of how important mobility is in reviewing tax and income data in context. As the IRS stated in the original study, 'the data shown in the table represent a changing group of taxpayers over time, rather than a fixed group of taxpayers.'

   "Comparisons of income and taxes over several years simply aren't meaningful when the membership of a group changes so drastically every year. It doesn't make a lot of sense to compare the taxes of one group of people in one year to a mostly different group of people in another year. The bottom line is that there is no solid basis for such comparisons, which can yield misleading results. The membership of the group of 400 top taxpayers changes dramatically from one year to another," Saxton concluded.

   For more information on taxation, please visit our website at www.house.gov/jec.

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