ALBANY — New York State’s revenue collections keep coming up short.
The state’s budget division said Wednesday that lower than expected tax revenue from Wall Street and rising Medicaid costs are driving up the state’s deficit. For the coming fiscal year, which begins on April 1, the deficit is now $8.2 billion, up from $7.4 billion when Gov. David A. Paterson laid out his proposed budget.
Robert L. Megna, the state budget director, said in comments to reporters Wednesday morning that revenue collections from Wall Street banks came in well below expectations and that personal income tax collections over all were about $1 billion below expectations.
“We know that big guys typically pay us at the end of January,” Mr. Megna said, referring to large banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase. “Last week, after the budget came out, they didn’t pay us.”
He offered a number of theories that might explain why the payments were delayed — more bonus payments made in stock, payments being spread out over a longer period — but added that the state was not expecting the lowered payments to be fully made up in the coming weeks.
Spending on Medicaid also continues to rise faster than expected as the economic crisis has driven more people to enroll. Costs are $400 million higher than expected in the coming year, the budget office said.
In other dismal budget news, the office of Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli says there is more budget balancing to be done in the last two months of the current fiscal year. Mr. DiNapoli’s office said the current deficit was roughly $1 billion, about twice what the governor had forecast.
“I called the budget passed last April a buy-time budget,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement, “but it didn’t buy all that much time.”
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