West Virginia’s general revenue collections fell below the monthly estimate by by $7,700,683.
General revenue collections for October totaled $380,374,317, falling below the monthly estimate of $388,075,000.
Despite the monthly setback, the state’s cumulative fiscal year-to-date collections remained positive at $1.79 billion, surpassing expectations by more than 3 percent.
“Our collections remain steady, you know, for the month and both year and date,” said Revenue Secretary Eric Nelson.
Major revenue streams had mixed results, as personal income tax and consumer sales tax outperformed monthly targets, but corporate net income tax suffered negative collections because o heavy refunds and recent tax adjustments.
“In the month of October, our corporate net income tax was a big driver. It was down more than $17 million versus estimates — $7 million year to date and $20 million to prior year,” Nelson said.
“A lot of this is being driven by the tax effects to corporations and the Big Beautiful Bill. And in particular what hit us this in the month of October; We had a number of very large refunds totaling in excess of $18 million. So even though collections were stronger than estimates, our refunds outpaced that and resulted in a down month.”
Severance tax beat its monthly projection despite October traditionally yielding the lowest estimates because of annual local resource distributions.
Meanwhile, categories such as tobacco products tax, insurance tax and interest income mostly hovered near their respective targets despite lingering market uncertainties.