April 22, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
Preliminary tax data released by the Internal Revenue Service show that the deductions Americans claimed for charitable contributions increased by 18.5 per cent from 1996 to 1997. The government said that deductions climbed from $85.6-billion to $101.4-billion.
An important caveat: The I.R.S. statistics are based on a small sample of individual income-tax returns that were filed last year and compared with a similar sample from the previous year. The revenue service will release data based on a larger sample of returns in coming months.
The data are in a report, “Individual Income Tax Returns, 1997: Early Tax Estimates,” which is published in the revenue service’s Statistics of Income Bulletin for winter 1998-99. The report may be obtained for $19 a copy from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh 15250-7954.
