The nation’s tax revenues fell for the first time in nine quarters primarily because of lower revenue from securities transaction taxes and land value increment taxes, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday.
Tax revenues declined 0.8 percent to NT$307.6 billion (US$10.41 billion) during the first quarter of the year from a year earlier, marking the first annual decrease since the fourth quarter of 2009.
The latest figures mean that the ministry is slightly behind its target of collecting NT$314.52 billion in tax revenue during the first three months of this year, according to an official report.
“First-quarter tax revenue fell short of the government’s budget projections,” statistics department deputy director Hsu Ray-lin (許瑞琳) told a press conference.
Revenue from land value increment taxes and securities transaction taxes fell most among all taxes in the first quarter, Hsu said.
Land value increment tax revenue fell 24.3 percent to NT$17.3 billion in the first quarter from a year earlier, with the number of tax application cases dropping 18.8 percent from a year ago to 134,552, the report said.
Securities transaction taxes also fell 14.8 percent from the previous year to NT$22 billion during the January-to-March period, the data showed.
However, it was too early to evaluate whether tax revenues would reach the government’s overall budget of NT$1.8225 trillion, Hsu said, adding that the ministry would have a clearer picture after income tax figures became available in the middle of the year.
Last month, tax revenues rose 1.4 percent year-on-year to NT$140 billion, the ministry said, which represented 88.7 percent growth from a month earlier.
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