photo by: Kansas Department of Revenue

Kansas Department of Revenue

TOPEKA – Kansas tax receipts came in almost exactly as projected in August, the Kansas Department of Revenue said Tuesday.

During August, the state collected $494.3 million in receipts from various kinds of taxes. That was about $6 million, or 1.27 percent, more than expected.

Individual income tax receipts came in below projections by about $4 million, or less than 2 percent, while retail sales taxes were $1.3 million below estimates, or less than 1 percent.

But some other revenue streams came in slightly above estimates, such as oil and gas severance taxes, which came in $1 million higher than expected and just over $831,000 higher than August of last year.

For the first two months of the current fiscal year, total taxes have exceeded projections by $17.6 million, or 1.8 percent.

The recent stability in tax receipts marks a departure from the state’s recent history

In 2012, then-Gov. Sam Brownback championed a historic package of tax cuts that included lowering income tax rates across the board and completely exempting certain kinds of business income from state taxes.

State budget officials had expected that to result in lower tax receipts while Brownback and his supporters said it would boost the state’s economy. But receipts ended up falling much more sharply than officials had projected at the time, resulting in revenue shortfalls and a long series of spending cuts as well as borrowing from other funds.

In 2017, the Republican-controlled Legislature reversed course on the Brownback tax plan, over his veto, by putting business income back on the tax rolls and raising individual rates, although not as high as they had been before the 2012 changes. That led to several months of tax receipts coming in far higher than expected.

But in April of this year, the state’s Consensus Revenue Estimating Group issued new estimates, raising their previous estimates for the current fiscal year, which began July 1, by more than $300 million. Since then, actual receipts have been coming in within just a few percentage points of the new projections.