Tuesday, October 7, 2014

State still behind in revenue collections



State Revenue Secretary Bob Kiss says West Virginia’s economy continues to send mixed signals. Kiss and other state officials released the latest revenue collection numbers Monday.
“We are in pretty much in the same status-quo position we were last month,” Kiss said. “The deficit has grown some, there were some timing reasons for that and some other reasons, but it doesn’t cause us a tremendous amount of concern.”
Revenue collections missed estimates in September by $23.8 million. Kiss said that’s mainly because transfer of severance tax revenues to counties took place earlier than anticipated. The move made severance tax collections $28.5 million short of where the state thought they would be in September.
However, the state did report a strong month in personal income tax collections. Deputy Revenue Secretary Mark Muchow said it was $6.5 million above estimate and nearly 9 percent better than last fiscal year at this time. It’s an indication more people are working and existing pay is increasing. Personal income tax is the state’s largest revenue source, making up 40 percent of collections.
Muchow said he would anticipate the consumer sales tax collections to reflect the increase in personal income tax collections over the next few months.
Secretary Kiss said despite the improvements, the state is still running a deficit in collections for the fiscal year so it must continue to be monitored.
“Right now we don’t necessarily need to take any immediate action. We are continuing to watch it and monitor the numbers month-to-month,” Kiss said.
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s state government hiring freeze remains in place and Kiss doesn’t seen any changes in that now.
“In any year, generally, we like to see the data through October and November before we start trying to make projections through the whole year based on that. So I think we’re still a couple of months away from that,” Kiss said.