The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Committee on National Statistics will appoint an ad hoc panel to (1) review the major income, consumption, and wealth statistics currently produced by U.S. statistical agencies, and (2) provide guidance for modernizing the information to better inform policy and research (such as understanding trends in inequality and mobility). As part of its review, the panel may consider a range of issues, including the following:

• appropriate definitions of household, family, and individual income, consumption, and wealth; variations in definitions that would be useful for particular purposes (e.g., market income before government taxes and transfers); inclusion of particular components (e.g., capital gains and wealth transfers); different reference periods (e.g., sub-annual versus annual); and comparability with commonly used international concepts and methods;
• the treatment of and method(s) used to value in-kind benefits and services (e.g., health insurance or transfers of food or housing);
• the treatment of retirement income and plan contributions;
• the population groups (e.g., age, race/ethnicity, and gender groups) for which separate estimates are appropriate;
• the appropriate breakouts of income, consumption, and wealth statistics (e.g., by deciles, top and bottom 1% and 5%);
• the level of geographic granularity for which estimates are appropriate;
• the desired frequency and timeliness of updated estimates;
• needed quality improvements for relevant data collection programs (including cross-sectional and longitudinal data sets);
• the cost and respondent burden for collecting the data;
• the potential for using multiple data sources, including surveys, state and federal administrative records, and commercial data, as well modeling, to produce integrated, highest-quality estimates; and
• legal, administrative, and other barriers to creating an integrated system of household, family, and individual income, consumption, and wealth statistics.

As part of its deliberations, the panel will evaluate the need for and value of a fully integrated system of income, consumption, and wealth statistics to provide consistent macro-level statistics (e.g., total household or family income) and micro-level statistics (e.g., income for households in each quintile of the distribution). The panel will produce a final report with conclusions and recommendations regarding the relevance, accuracy, timeliness, geographic and population detail, and consistency of statistics on income, consumption and wealth, and the need for an integrated system of these statistics.