GOJ lowers fiscal deficit to $64 billion

The government of Jamaica incurred a fiscal deficit on operations of $64 billion for the fiscal year to March compared to a forecasted deficit of $84 billion, resulting from s modest reduction in revenues and sizable fall in expenditure, with government collecting $576 billion in revenues and spending $635 billion.

Inflows of GCT on local goods and services fell $7.6 billion below budget for the GOJ fiscal year to March, followed by a drop of $4.1 billion in Special Consumption taxes on local and imported goods and a $1.6 billion shortfall in Education Taxes resulted in an $11 billion shortfall in consumption taxes for the year. Company profit taxes surged $4 billion to $66 billion, a $1.2 billion outperformance by PAYE and $2.2 billion over performance by tax on interest income resulted in income and profit taxes outperforming forecast by $8 billion a $2 billion increase in Grants over budget resulted in a net revenue shortfall of $1 billion for the fiscal year to March.
The government paid $7.2 billion on interest than budgeted, while $1.8 billion was paid on employees emoluments, other expenses had a reduction of $6.7 billion compared to the forecast and $2.8 billion less was spent on capital items, which together resulted in an overall reduction in expenditure of $18.6 billion.