Sales tax is by far the largest consistent component in revenue generation for the state of North Dakota, but it is by no means the only one. With that in mind I am generating similar information for other revenue streams. Today it will be corporate income taxes. This one is a bit tricky to look at because there are instances of missing values. These are not missing in the sense that somebody is hiding something; these are missing values in the sense that the report provides nothing for the forecast value for corporate income tax in July, August, and September in that particular publication by the state OMB.

So here are the actual corporate income tax collections:

There is a high degree of variability in the revenues, and appears to be some seasonality as well. When we add in the forecast values the graph gets a bit messy and difficult to read.

The forecast value is in blue and seems, generally, to understate the tax collections, unfortunately until we get to the end of the time frame when the collections come in well below forecast. I created a graph of the difference as well (actual less forecast) to see what it can tell us.

Overall the forecasting here is not good, but probably not as bad as what we saw in the sales tax outcomes. There were some very big misses with actual far in excess of the forecast at the same time we saw the same situation with sales taxes. So essentially we had another situation where revenue came in well ahead of expectations, and for all we  know, it did that until it did not.

The same time period of improved accuracy exists here as with sales tax, and then the decline that followed collapse in the oil sector. Just to be clear, the gaps in the line come from where there are no data values provided. Unfortunately you need to conclude, well I guess you do not need to but I conclude, that forecasting let us down again and the misses were significant and persistent.

This work by Flynnglis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International