Protecting Privacy and Expanding Access in a Modern Administrative Tax Data System

National Tax Journal · 2024

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Public economics

Providing access to confidential tax data for research while protecting taxpayers’ privacy has grown increasingly difficult using traditional disclosure control methods. For that reason, we have been working to implement two new tools to protect taxpayer privacy and expand access to tax data for research. This paper reports on progress in producing a high-quality synthetic public-use file of individual income tax information and a safe way for researchers to perform statistical analysis on confidential tax data without seeing individual records. We discuss modern privacy methods, the advantages and limitations inherent in applying them to tax data, and implementation challenges.

Reliability Theory and Practice for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

IEEE Internet of Things Journal · 2022 · 124 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Computer Science

Due to rapid advancements on the Internet of Things (IoT), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are transforming numerous military and civil application areas. UAVs aim to enhance the production efficiency, ensure safety, and reduce risk, particularly protecting the human workforce in the case of harsh and dangerous environments. Due to the mission-critical, business-critical, or safety-critical nature of the UAV applications, it is pivotal that UAVs perform reliably to deliver the required service during the intended mission time. Therefore, reliability is one of the essential requirements for designing and operating UAVs. This article presents a critical review of UAV reliability literature in both theoretical and practical research, pinpointing failure causes and reliability challenges of UAV systems, classifying and reflecting on the reliability modeling, analysis, and design methods for UAV systems and key subsystems. Some open research problems and opportunities are also discussed to highlight potential new challenges for designing reliable and resilient UAVs and UAV-assisted IoT systems.

How much longevity can money buy? Estimating mortality rates for wealthy individuals

Statistical Journal of the IAOS · 2018-02-09

Federal estate tax data have been used to produce estimates of U.S. personal wealth for almost 100 years. To produce representative estimates, the methodology relies on mortality rates appropriate to relatively wealthy decedents. Because the estate t

Optimization of dynamic spot-checking for collusion tolerance in grid computing

Future Generation Computer Systems · 2018-02-02 · 4 citations

Fault Tolerance

2018-10-03 · 1 citations

Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to continue correct performance of its tasks after the occurrence of hardware or software faults. The physical replication of hardware is perhaps the most common form of fault tolerance used in systems. Information redundancy is simply the addition of redundant information to data to allow fault detection, fault masking, or possibly fault tolerance. Software faults are unusual entities. Software does not break as hardware does, but instead software faults are the result of incorrect software designs or coding mistakes. The recovery block approach to software fault tolerance is analogous to the active approaches to hardware fault tolerance, specifically the cold standby sparing approach. An extremely important parameter in the design and analysis of fault-tolerant systems is fault coverage. The fault coverage available in a system can have a tremendous impact on the reliability, safety, and other attributes of the system.

Using administrative records to improve official statistics produced by the Statistics of Income Division, IRS

Statistical Journal of the IAOS · 2018-02-09 · 1 citations

The Statistics of Income (SOI) Division of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) uses administrative data from tax and information returns to collect information for its statistical studies. This paper reviews fundamental “Big Data” issues with res

Mission Reliability, Cost and Time for Cold Standby Computing Systems with Periodic Backup

IEEE Transactions on Computers · 2014-04-03 · 62 citations

Life critical applications like space missions and flight controls require their computing systems to be equipped with some fault-tolerance mechanism to meet stringent reliability requirements by performing the intended function even in the case of element failures. Such benefit, however, cannot come without extra time as well as extra overhead and capital costs. This paper for the first time considers the modeling and evaluation of mission reliability, expected mission time and cost simultaneously for 1-out-of- <inline-formula><tex-math>$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> : G non-repairable cold standby computing systems subject to periodic backup actions. Based on the suggested numerical evaluation method, the optimal backup frequency problems are formulated and solved, providing the optimal number of backup operations during the mission to maximize the system reliability or to minimize the mission cost or time. In the case of non-identical system elements, the optimal standby element sequencing problem arises as the order in which the system elements are initiated can impact the system reliability and mission cost and time greatly; such problems are formulated and solved for the 1-out-of- <inline-formula><tex-math>$N$</tex-math></inline-formula> : G cold standby computing systems with periodic backups. Furthermore, a combined optimization problem is considered, where a combination of the element initiation sequence and backup frequency providing the best combination of mission reliability, cost, and time is found. The proposed methodology can facilitate a reliability-cost-time tradeoff study in the practical design of cold standby systems, thus assist in making the optimal decision on the system's standby and backup policy. Examples are provided for illustrating the considered problems and suggested solution methodology.

ection Technique for ehavioral-Level Models

2014-12-04

recognized the importance of incorporating fault tolerance into microelectronic designs. However, they often performed this task late in the process when the design was near completion. As computer systems become more complex, designers must consider fault tolerance throughout the design process to allow early estimation of reliabil-ity and fault coverage. Designers usually perform dependability parameter estimation (DPE) at a high level of abstraction, using stochastic Petri net or queuing models. However, as specifications become more demanding, designers must go to increasingly lower levels of modeled

An Enduring Partnership: Incorporating Administrative Data into Sample Design for the Survey of Consumer Finances 1

2013-01-01

The triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is distinguished as an outstanding source of information on income and balance sheets, demographics, and economic expectations of U.S. households. It includes representative coverage across the income and wealth spectra, enabling users to study assets that are widely distributed in the economy as well as those that are much more concentrated. 2 This is made possible by a dual frame sample design that includes both a traditional area probability sample and a list sample that is used to oversample high-wealth households. Since its institution, the list sample has been developed using administrative data accessed through a partnership between the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB) and the Statistics of Income Division (SOI) of the Internal Revenue Service. This partnership recognizes the essential contribution of the SCF in helping policymakers understand the impact of current and proposed tax policies on American households. Section 1 provides background on the SCF, a brief history of SOI’s support of the survey, and a discussion of the importance of these data to tax policy research. Section 2 describes the evolution of the list sample while Section 3 discusses benefits to SOI and FRB of partnering on the SCF. Some direct comparisons of SOI and SCF estimates are presented in Section 4 in order to demonstrate the importance of benchmarking results for improving data quality, and Section 5 provides concluding remarks. The goal of this paper is to document the benefits of partnering on projects of National interest as a model for advancing a wide range of institutional goals. 1. Background The FRB’s Survey of Consumer Finances collects data on the assets and liabilities of U.S. households. These data include extensive information on financial services used, employment histories, pension rights, and demographic characteristics. The survey has its roots in the FRB’s 1962 Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers (SFCC). 3 Since 1983, the FRB has conducted the SCF triennially based on a cross-sectional sample of U.S. households, although on a few occasions, it has re-interviewed respondents to create panel datasets. 4

The Income and Wealth of 2007 Estate Tax Decedents

2012-01-01

T he Statistics of Income (SOI) Division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has periodically combined wealth data reported on Federal estate tax returns, fi led for relatively wealthy decedents, with income tax data reported by these decedents for the last full year prior to death. Such linked datasets provide unique windows into the relationship between realized income and wealth. Of particular interest is how the composition of income varies among decedents in different phases of the life cycle. Past research has shown that older top wealth holders report less income than similar, younger decedents (see, for example, Steuerle 1983, Steuerle 1985, and Johnson & Wahl 2004). This paper updates previous research using a new dataset focused on decedents who died in 2007, a group with suffi cient wealth to place them in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution. Unlike some earlier datasets, the relatively large sample size of the dataset used in this research allows us to examine differences among demographic groups in detail, and its focus on a single year of death reduces inter-temporal effects on results. In this article, we compare our fi ndings with those from earlier studies and fi nd surprising similarity in the estimated aggregate rates of return on assets over the more than 3 decades represented in these studies.