April 15 A Week Away

Californians have one week to complete their tax returns, but some of the early (earlier) birds have already paid.  Between Monday and today, Tuesday, April 8, the Franchise Tax Board has collected somewhere around $300 million in personal income tax receipts according to preliminary figures.   Including the revenues from withholding for individuals and netting out refunds, the two-day take has been about $680 million.  This is about $100 million more than was collected during the comparable two-day period last year.

California Consumers Out Shopping

Although the Passover and Easter holidays are a week and two weeks away, respectively, Californians are shopping and adding to California’s tax collections.  Retail sales tax collections for April 7 and 8, which also included the weekend, totaled $26.5 million.  This dwarfed the $11.2 million received a year ago, when Easter and Passover occurred at the end of March.  Typically, retail sales tax receipts -- excluding major consumer durable goods -- account for about one-third of sales tax collections.

April Tax Receipts Reach $1.3 Billion in First Week

Final numbers are in for California’s tax take on its three major revenue sources for the first week of April though Monday, the 7th, and the numbers look positive.  The first week total was $1.3 billion, which is about 10.2% of the total expected for the month as a whole. This is identical to the proportion reached in the comparable first tax reporting week of April 2013.

Corporate taxes are at 9.8% of their monthly target. While retail sales refunds so far have exceeded tax payments, personal income tax receipts are already at 13.3% of their monthly goal. The heavy inflows of personal tax payments should come around the middle of the month.

Nearly two-thirds of every dollar deposited in the General Fund comes from the Personal Income Tax (PIT).  Individuals pay the bulk of this tax, but certain partnerships and closely held companies may also opt into the income tax system.  These partnerships and S-corporations account for less than 10 percent of the total PIT collections.