BizSugar.com › Taxes › The IRS Says Freelance Economy is on the Rise, the BLS Disagrees

Data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reveal that self-employment is on the rise and has been growing since the late 1990s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) figures indicate that self-employment has been flat over the same period.
The tax authority’s numbers show that the number of individual income tax returns that took the self-employment tax deduction rose by 35.2 percent, and that the number of tax returns that show either non-farm income or loss increased by 35.3 percent, between 1998 and 2013 (the most recent year for which data are available). That’s almost double the 18.4 percent increase in the number of individual tax returns filed over the same period.