EVEN in a bad year, some people can get very lucky.

A newly released report by the Internal Revenue Service shows that, for Americans as a group, total income fell at the fastest pace in decades in 2008, and that the number of tax returns reporting at least $1 million in income plunged by 22 percent as the Great Recession took hold.

But even with all the bad news, there were still 13,480 tax returns that reported income of more than $10 million in the year.

Among them were 462 returns that reported some income from gambling. Their total income from that source was $2.6 billion, for an average of $5.6 million per return.

The report, based on a survey of tax returns for 2008, states that Americans reported $8.4 trillion in total income, down 4.6 percent from the previous year. After considering inflation, the real decline was 8.4 percent, the sharpest decline in total American income since at least 1990.