The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The Government is “on course” to achieve its full-year forecasts for revenue and the fiscal deficit, state finance minister, Michael Halkitis, said yesterday.

    During his presentation for the 2014-2015 mid-year Budget debate, Mr Halkitis said the Christie administration had so far succeeded in reducing the GFS fiscal deficit from 6.3 per cent of GDP in 2012-2013 to 5.4 per cent,  and is on track to reduce this further to a projected of 3.2 per cent in 2014-2015 - a sum below $300  million.

“At the mid-point of the 2014-2015  fiscal year recurrent expenditure stood at 48.7 per cent of the total projected for the full year,” the Minster said. 

“Capital expenditure stood at about 40 per cent, which again is less than half, and both of these clearly are under firm control and well within target.

“Recurrent revenue at the mid-point has behaved as we expected. Total collections amount to 39 per cent of the full year forecast, and this is expected because the reality is that given the structure of our economy, the largest portion of fiscal revenues are collected in the period January to June,” added Mr Halkitis.

  “We are on course to achieve the full-year forecast for revenue and the deficit for 2014-2015.  Our medium term plan calls for the deficit to  fall to 1.4 per cent of  GDP in 2015-2016. That is the Budget we will present in May of this year.”

    Mr Halkitis said that through the Value-Added Tax (VAT) registration process, the Government has been able to largely address the “serious” problem of Business License compliance.

“We still have some to do but that is one of the side benefits of VAT implementation,” said Mr Halkitis.

He added that Tyler Technologies, the company contracted to develop a property tax management system for the Government, was making good progress.

“We are hopeful that things will be ready for online testing by the third quarter of this year, and this will allow for the modernisation and improvement of property tax management,” said Mr Halkitis.