California State Controller John Chiang offers this daily tax tracker to follow personal income taxes, sales and use taxes and corporate taxes -- the three major sources of revenue for the State.
The site will be updated regularly throughout each business day. Preliminary posts use dollar figures from tax administration agencies, while the following day the Controller will post reconciled (actual cash) figures. The latest figures are always available via direct download. Preliminary sales tax figures, along with personal income tax withholdings will be available by 10:30 a.m., followed by total personal income and corporate tax receipts, along with final sales tax numbers between 1:30 and 4:00 p.m. the same business day.
The chart on the right of this screen tracks the cumulative total of income, sales and corporate tax and compares it against estimated benchmarks for the month.
Preliminary
numbers for April 4 indicate a solid number for personal income taxes, supported
by a robust number for withholdings.
Employers reported $412 million in withholding taxes for the day,
bringing the month-to-date total to $1.0 billion. Estimated tax and final tax payments were
essentially equal to refunds, so that total net personal income tax payments also
came in at about $1.0 billion for April 1-4.
The
interest in the income tax returns was not always so great. Thirty years
ago, when the state relied more heavily on sales tax revenue, budget watchers
were more concerned about holiday sales receipts reported in December and
January. Now, as expected, corporate tax
and retail sales made little additional contribution to the revenue aggregate
of California’s “big three” tax sources, leaving the total at about one billion
dollars for the first few days of the month. This is a good first milestone for
April.
Taxpayers
have about two weeks to complete their tax returns. So much of the state’s
General Fund depends on collections of the income tax. No wonder April tax
returns are of interest.
With just
three days of final numbers, refunds are exceeding payments, but this should
soon change. Preliminary numbers show a strong number for withholding for April
4 ($412m).
Updated figures
posted for yesterday, April 3 ($184m for PIT, 18.6m corp and 16.7m sales).
