Financial Data and Charitable Donations, Preliminary T1 Family File

Financial Data and Charitable Donations, Preliminary T1 Family File
Summary of changes
Other reference periods
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Detailed information for 2005

Status:

Active

Frequency:

Annual

Record number:

4106

This activity is conducted for the development and dissemination of annual small area economic data for Canadians.

Data release - November 22, 2006 (2005 Registered Retirement Savings Plan Contributions and 2006 RRSP Contributions Limits): November 23, 2006 (2005 Savers, Investors and Investment Income and 2005 Charitable Donors)

Description

This activity is conducted for the development and dissemination of annual small area economic data for Canadians. The data, collected from income tax returns submitted to the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), provide financial information (RRSP Contributions, RRSP Room, Savings and Investment Income) and the amount of charitable donations reported on the tax file. The data are available for Canada, the provinces and territories and sub-provincial geographic areas (postal areas and selected Census areas). Data are used by financial institutions and charitable organizations to evaluate contributions and support marketing decisions. Academics and researchers use the data for analyses of economic conditions.

Reference period: Calendar year "y" for income and contributions, end of calendar year "y" for age, point in time (usually April of calendar year "y+1") for address information.

Collection period: Income tax returns are filed mainly in the spring following the year of reference. The preliminary T1 file for income year "y" is received from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) in September or October of the year "y+1".

Subjects

  • Household, family and personal income
  • Household spending and savings
  • Income, pensions, spending and wealth
  • Pension plans and funds and other retirement income programs

Data sources and methodology

Target population

These data cover all persons who completed a T1 tax return for the year of reference by the date the file was copied for Statistics Canada. This is a preliminary version of the T1 file and therefore the file is missing a certain amount of late tax filers.

Sampling

This methodology does not apply.

Data sources

Data are extracted from administrative files.

The individual T1 tax file is received from the Canada Revenue Agency. The file is processed over a one-week period to create the standard tabulations. The input files contain records for 22.9 million unique individuals for the 2004 tax year. Taxfilers who died within the year are not counted.

The period of income is the calendar year.

Error detection

During processing, there is some automatic editing. Variables with values of unity (a type of flag for CRA) are converted to zero. In total, for tax year 2004, for example, about 6% of the records had at least one field changed from a 1 to a 0. In a marginal number of cases, variables with values above some absolute maxima are corrected, some negative values are changed to be positive and those with outliers in the key fields are eliminated. Thus, very few records are changed.

Imputation

This methodology does not apply.

Estimation

This methodology type does not apply to this statistical program.

Quality evaluation

The estimates are evaluated primarily by trend analysis.

Disclosure control

Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any data which would divulge information obtained under the Statistics Act that relates to any identifiable person, business or organization without the prior knowledge or the consent in writing of that person, business or organization. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.

Only a small group of people within the Division have access to confidential data. Users must specify their requirements to these people who then carry out the retrievals. Before release, data are subjected to stringent non-disclosure practices:

1. There must be a minimum of 100 taxfilers in any geographic area before any data will be produced.
2. Any cell must represent a minimum of 15 taxfilers, otherwise it is suppressed.
3. Each cell which can be dominated by one tax filer (or one family) is checked for dominance and suppressed if a problem is identified.
4. Once the primary suppressions are made, complementary suppressions are made so that suppressed information cannot be discovered residually. This is an iterative process - each complementary suppression may require an additional complementary suppression. Patterns are created to keep these to a minimum.
5. Finally, the counts and amounts are rounded -- counts to the nearest ten, aggregate amounts to the nearest $1,000 and distribution measures such as percentiles to the nearest $100 for amounts of $1,000 or more, and to the nearest $10 for amounts under $1,000.
6. Averages and percentages are based on rounded counts and amounts to prevent the unravelling of non-disclosure procedures.

Revisions and seasonal adjustment

Once the data are finalized, they are not revised. For analyses, data are sometimes adjusted to constant dollars for comparison with data from other years, but only current dollars are kept on the file.

Data accuracy

The data for these products are derived from an early file from CRA. They benefit from timeliness, but lose some accuracy because of it. These earlier T1 tax files contain from 97.7% to 99.3% of the records on the files received four to five months later.

The data are unadjusted apart from editing and estimation of missing components to achieve a definition of income that is closer to Statistics Canada's definition of income. There are no coefficients of variation from sampling, as the population studied is nearly a census of filers and the data are neither weighted nor adjusted to compensate for the earliness of the file.

Documentation

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