Press Release

**February Net Tax Revenues Top $1.9 billion    **                                     

The State of Georgia’s net tax collections for February totaled over $1.93 billion, for an increase of $581 million, or 42.9 percent, compared to February 2020, when net tax collections totaled $1.35 billion.  Year-to-date, net tax collections totaled nearly $17.04 billion, for an increase of almost $1.48 billion, or 9.5 percent, over last year, while year-to-date gross tax collections totaled $22.62 billion, for an increase of $1.38 billion or 6.5 percent over FY 2020.

February’s net tax collections growth was greatly influenced by the State of Georgia’s concurrence with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) guidance that directed the acceptance and processing of 2020 Individual tax year returns beginning February 12, 2021.  This deferred commencement of tax returns processing led to a corresponding delay in tax refunds, which yielded an extraordinarily favorable net revenue variance within the Individual Income Tax category and in net revenue collections overall.  This highly favorable variance is depicted in the section below detailing notable year-over-year variances within the Individual Income Tax category.  Over the next several months refund processing will be accelerated, which will moderate the disproportionately favorable impact on the financial results reported in February and mitigate the large, short-term impact of the processing delay.