Protecting Privacy and Expanding Access in a Modern Administrative Tax Data System

Providing access to confidential tax data for research while protecting taxpayers’ privacy has grown increasingly difficult using traditional disclosure control methods. For that reason, we have been working to implement two new tools to protect taxpayer privacy and expand access to tax data for research. This paper reports on progress in producing a high-quality synthetic public-use file of individual income tax information and a safe way for researchers to perform statistical analysis on confidential tax data without seeing individual records. We discuss modern privacy methods, the advantages and limitations inherent in applying them to tax data, and implementation challenges.