By Adam Pagnucco.
Five years ago, I wrote a series on taxpayer flight from MoCo. At that time, I found that the county was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year as taxpayers moving out made more money than taxpayers moving in.
Now it’s time for an update. And here is a sad statement:
The problem has gotten worse since then.
The source for this series is a data series on tax migration maintained by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). As the IRS explains:
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Migration data for the United States are based on year-to-year address changes reported on individual income tax returns filed with the IRS. They present migration patterns by State or by county for the entire United States and are available for inflows—the number of new residents who moved to a State or county and where they migrated from, and outflows—the number of residents leaving a State or county and where they went. The data are available for Filing Years 1991 through 2021 and include:
- Number of returns filed, which approximates the number of households that migrated
- Number of personal exemptions claimed, which approximates the number of individuals
- Total adjusted gross income, starting with Filing Year 1995
- Aggregate migration flows at the State level, by the size of adjusted gross income (AGI) and age of the primary taxpayer, starting with Filing Year 2011.
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For every state and county in the U.S., the IRS tracks both inflow and outflow of returns, exemptions and adjusted gross income. But that’s not all: the IRS reports the origin and destination jurisdictions of these flows. So data users can see a situation in which County X has a net inflow overall but has a net inflow from County Y and a net outflow to County Z. The directions of these flows, in an out, become apparent when the data is downloaded and crunched.
Over the next few days, we will publish the following statistics.
Montgomery County’s inflows and outflows of returns and adjusted gross income from 1993 (the first year in which comparable data is available) to 2021. This data includes five additional years to our original series.
Inflow and outflow statistics for MoCo and its large neighbors – D.C., Frederick, Howard, Prince George’s, Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William – to provide perspective.
A listing of destination and origin jurisdictions of taxpayer migration between MoCo and its neighbors. This will identify MoCo’s comparative advantages and disadvantages in taxpayer flow across the region.
I will start revealing the updated data tomorrow.