INSTITUTE ON TAXATION AND ECONOMIC POLICY

Informing the debate on tax policy nationwide with research and data-driven solutions. We provide regular commentary on federal and state tax policy. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that produces timely, accessible, and sound analyses on federal, state, and local tax policy issues. ITEP's research helps inform policy makers, advocates, the media and general public about the fairness, adequacy, and sustainability of existing tax structures and how proposed tax changes would impact revenues and taxpayers across the income spectrum. ITEP's unique resources and capabilities ensure important fiscal policy decisions are not made in an informational vacuum.At both the state and federal level, ITEP's primary institutional focus is on conducting analyses of the fairness and revenue impact of proposed tax changes (as well as current tax systems), and ensuring that these analyses actually reach the hands of those who can affect policy outcomes, including lawmakers, the media, nonprofit advocates in a variety of policy areas and the general public. While ITEP's work focuses on all areas of federal, state and local tax policy, the organization has developed specialized expertise on a number of issues including earned income tax credits, gas taxes, corporate tax avoidance, and the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants and has helped to debunk research suggesting that no income tax states outperform states with high income taxes. To do this work, ITEP built a "microsimulation tax model" in 1996 capable of analyzing the tax systems of all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government. A microsimulation model uses a large sample of tax returns and other data to estimate the impact of tax systems and tax proposals on actual taxpayers at different income levels. This is the same type of tax model used by the U.S. Treasury Department, the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, and the Congressional Budget Office, as well as by many state revenue departments. Unlike ITEP's model, however, these organizations' models are only capable of producing analyses at the federal level, or in the case of state revenue departments, in a single state. A significant portion of ITEP's work consists of keeping its model up-to-date with the most current economic projections, and with recent changes to state and federal tax law.ITEP's tax model is in such demand that requests come in daily for analyses of specific projects and proposals. ITEP disseminates these analyses in two ways: by releasing independent reports describing the results of these analyses, and, more frequently, by collaborating with state and national partners. Much of ITEP's work happens behind the scenes providing our state and national partners with the data and information they need to engage in tax policy debates.