The Tax-Calculator Records class is flexible enough to read almost any
kind of CSV-formatted input data on filing units as long as the
variable names correspond to those expected by Tax-Calculator. The
only required input variables are RECID (a unique filing-unit record
identifier) and MARS (a positive-valued filing-status indicator).
Other variables in the input file must have variable names that are
included in the Input Variables
section
of the user documentation in order for them to affect tax
calculations. Any variable listed in Input Variables that is not in
an input file is automatically set to a value of zero for every filing
unit. Variables in the input file that are not listed in Input
Variables are ignored by Tax-Calculator.
However, there are important data-preparation issues related to the
fact that the payroll tax is a tax on individuals, not on income-tax
filing units. Tax-Calculator expects that the filing-unit total for
each of several earnings-related variables is split between the
taxpayer and the spouse. It is the responsibility of anyone preparing
data for Tax-Calculator input to do this earnings splitting. Here are
the relationships between the filing-unit variable and the taxpayer
(p) and spouse (s) variables expected by Tax-Calculator:
e00200 = e00200p + e00200s
e00900 = e00900p + e00900s
e02100 = e02100p + e02100s
Obviously, when MARS is not equal to 2 (married filing jointly), the
values of the three s variables are zero and the values of the three
p variables are equal to the value of their corresponding
filing-unit variable. And obviously, the input file can omit any one,
or all, of these three sets variables. If the three variables in one
of these sets are omitted, the required relationship will be satisfied
because zero equals zero plus zero.
But when including one of these three sets of variables, it is up to you to specify the taxpayer-spouse split. You will get an error message from Tax-Calculator, and it will stop running, if you do not split the filing-unit amount between taxpayer and spouse so that the above equations hold for each filing unit in the input file.
In addition to this earnings-splitting data-preparation issue,
Tax-Calculator expects that the value of ordinary dividends (e00600)
will be no less than the value of qualified dividends (e00650) for
each filing unit. Again, it is your responsibility to prepare input
data for Tax-Calculator in a way that ensures this relationship is
true for each filing unit.