Japan Sees Tax Revenues Slump For September

by Mary Swire, Tax-News.com, Hong Kong

05 November 2001

According to a report released by the Japanese Finance Ministry on Thursday, tax revenue in September fell to 2.31 trillion yen, a 5.8% drop from the same period last year.

This decline is partly due to a fall in corporate tax receipts, and has caused the government to revise its tax revenue projection by 1.1 trillion yen to 49.6 trillion yen. The revised figures will be formally endorsed this Friday, when an extra budget for fiscal 2001 will be adopted.

Although the outlook appears bleak for the already suffering Japanese economy, with corporate tax receipts showing a drop of around 14.2% for the month of September, there is still some room for optimism according to one Finance Ministry official, who told the Japan Times last week that the trend for the whole of fiscal 2001's corporate tax collection cannot be definitively predicted from the September data alone, as it covers only approximately 2% of the country's firms.

However, last week, Japanese officials also announced that consumption tax revenues had decreased last month by 5.9%, although income tax revenues overall for the April-September period were up by 10.3%.

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