Included, however, are all receipts from licenses and compulsory fees, including those that are imposed for regulatory purposes as well as those designed to provide revenue. Tax revenue is defined to include related penalty and interest receipts, but to exclude protested amounts and refunds. These surveys provided a basis for 96 percent of the collection amounts summarized in table 1. Most of the data in this report were gathered by mail canvass of appropriate state offices. In some instances data were compiled by trained representatives of the Bureau of the Census from official state records.
Data are subject to possible inaccuracies in classification, response, and processing.
Every effort is made to keep such errors to a minimum through care in examining, editing, and tabulating the data. Beginning with the third quarter of 1988, property tax collections as shown in Table 1 are estimated based upon information from a revised stratified sample panel containing 530 counties or county-type areas which are served altogether by approximately 5,900 local tax collecting agencies. Figures concerning quarterly collections were requested by mail from all these agencies, and reports were obtained from over 70 percent of them. The sampling variation of the 12-month aggregate is usually less than 1 percent. The quarterly estimates were found subject to a sampling variability of less than 2 percent.