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Tax Administration: Information Is Not Available to Determine Whether $5 Billion in Liberty Zone Tax Benefits Will Be Realized

GAO-03-1102 Published: Sep 30, 2003. Publicly Released: Oct 06, 2003.
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Highlights

The President pledged a minimum of $20 billion in assistance to New York for response and recovery efforts after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. This includes tax benefits, commonly referred to as the Liberty Zone tax benefits, that the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated would reduce federal tax revenues by about $5 billion. The actual amount of benefits realized, however, will depend on the extent to which taxpayers and the city and state of New York take advantage of them. GAO was asked to determine (1) the extent to which the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is collecting and reporting information about the number of taxpayers using each of the seven Liberty Zone tax benefits and the revenue loss associated with those benefits and (2) if IRS is not collecting and reporting this information, what steps it would need to take and what resources would be needed to do so.

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Data collectionDisaster relief aidFederal taxesLossesTax administrationTax creditTaxpayersReal propertyDepreciationRevenue loss