Tax revenue last month more than doubled year-on-year to NT$621.7 billion (US$20.23 billion), as the COVID-19 pandemic-fueled moratorium for income tax declarations last year lowered the comparison base, the Ministry of Finance said on Friday.
The national treasury received a boost from an artificial intelligence (AI) fever that allowed securities transaction tax revenue to return to growth territory for the first time in nearly two years.
Corporate income tax revenue surged 12.8 times from a year earlier to NT$319.3 billion, while personal income tax revenue advanced 74.1 percent to NT$59.1 billion, the ministry said, attributing the bumps to different timings for annual income tax declarations.
Photo: CNA
The ministry last year extended the deadline for tax filing by one month to June, as spiking COVID-19 infections disrupted people’s daily activities, which led to poor showings for May last year, statistics official Liang Kuan-shuan (梁冠璇) said.
Securities transaction tax revenue grew 10.9 percent to NT$15.9 billion, ending 16 straight months of declines after daily stock market turnover expanded 9 percent to NT$309.9 billion last month, the ministry said.
The data reflect an improvement in investment interest, Liang said, adding that the momentum was evident this month when daily turnover reached NT$337.4 billion.
The improvement came after Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest AI graphics chip supplier, posted strong earnings guidance for this quarter and beyond.
The recent visit of the company’s chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) to the Computex trade show in Taipei supported the frenzy, as Taiwanese electronics companies are part of Nvidia’s global supply chains.
“The state coffers benefited from the AI fever judging by the daily stock turnover, but it remains to be seen whether the uptrend can be sustained,” Liang said, adding that the recent daily trading volume beat the ministry’s forecast for this year.
Revenue from the land value incremental tax, a gauge of the property market’s health, fell 27.9 percent from a year earlier to NT$6.2 billion after the number of taxable cases decreased 7.8 percent to 51,942, the ministry said.
Last month’s fall in land value incremental tax revenue moderated from a drop of 34.5 percent in April, the ministry said.
Although the annual decline in revenue from the integrated house and land transaction income tax tapered off to 6.5 percent last month from a fall of 27.6 percent in April, it is too early to speculate on a recovery in the local real-estate market as the macro-environment remains unfavorable, Laing said.
The nation posted total tax revenue of NT$1.24 trillion in the first five months of the year, up 36 percent from the same period last year, the ministry said.
The figure from January to last month was ahead of the ministry’s budget schedule by 45.3 percent, it said.
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