The numbers include payments till 11:30 pm on December 15, the last day for paying advance tax for the third quarter.
“The final numbers may go up further on Monday as we will get more data from the banks,” a senior official told ET. The final collections data will be released next week.
Of the total, corporate tax accounted for ₹4.81 lakh crore, while personal income tax contributed ₹1.42 lakh crore, the official cited above said.
“High growth in advance tax collections suggests that the momentum of economic growth has continued in the early part of this quarter,” said Aditi Nayar, chief economist at rating agency ICRA.
The Centre has budgeted ₹18.20 lakh crore from direct taxes in FY24, a 9.6% rise from the latest estimate available for FY23. The budget estimate (BE) for direct tax revenue in the last fiscal (FY23) was ₹14.2 lakh crore. It was later revised to ₹16.5 lakh crore and ended marginally higher at ₹16.61 lakh crore.”We expect the direct tax collections to overshoot the budget estimates,” said Nayar.Last week, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) raised its FY24 GDP forecast to 7%, from 6.5% estimated earlier, after the economy surprised on the upside, expanding 7.6% in the September quarter.
The healthy advance tax collections indicate robust corporate profits.
Corporate earnings
The better-than-budgeted tax collections will give the government room to meet its fiscal deficit target for FY24, pegged at 5.9% of GDP.
“The growth is reflective of the jump in corporate earnings and an indication that the economy is continuing to expand at a healthy pace,” Rohinton Sidhwa, partner, Deloitte India. “In addition, final self-assessment taxes due also seem to have aided the collections as the return filing deadlines have expired on November 30.”
Advance tax collections in FY23 for the April 1 to December 17 period were ₹5.21 lakh crore, and for April 1 to September 17, ₹3.55 lakh crore.
