ANALYSIS:Although exchequer figures do not give a full picture, tax take beat expectation last month, writes DAN O'BRIEN, Economics Editor

WITH TWO-THIRDS of the year over, the cumulative exchequer deficit stood at €12.1 billion. Where does this leave the public finances in relation to the plan set out in the budget? There is no precise answer to that question.

The Department of Finance publishes forecasts for many of the component parts of revenue and expenditure, but not all. While an analysis of available numbers suggests that things are turning out more or less as projected, it is difficult to verify this with precision.

Muddying the waters further is the fact that the set of accounts that really matter are EU-compatible ones, not the much narrower exchequer figures.

On the revenue side, for instance, PRSI generates billions of euro. But these receipts don’t show up in the exchequer numbers. Plenty of public spending does not appear in the exchequer figures either, including contributory benefit spending and local government outlays. The EU-compatible accounts include all these things, but are published only twice a year.

What is known is that capital spending is still €800 million below where the Department of Finance thought it would be in the January-August period, while current spend is €200 million above. This gives the Government leeway to meet its overall spending target over the remainder of the year.

Over the same period, revenues were €140 million below projections. To understand the revenue dynamic, figures for individual months need to be looked at, as well as the cumulative figures since the start of the year.

Looking at August alone, the Government had expected very low tax revenues. In the event, all tax heads were ahead of expectations.

It would be wrong to give too much emphasis to any particular month’s developments given how unpredictable and volatile revenue flows tend to be, but a decline of 17 per cent (see chart) on August 2009 was not positive. It was also the largest such decline in six months.

As both charts illustrate corporation tax is the weak point. Cumulatively, corporate profits generated a quarter less revenue in the first eight months of 2010 compared to the same period in 2009.