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Aurora reports January sales tax decline amid filing-frequency shift; large taxpayers up
Summary
City budget staff reported January sales tax receipts of about $30.1 million, down $837,000 (2.7%) from a year earlier; staff said a change in taxpayer filing frequency and a late Thanksgiving affected timing, while the city's 200 largest monthly filers grew about 7%.
Phil Levine, budget office staff, told the Aurora City Finance Committee that the city collected $30,100,000 in sales tax for January, $837,000 less than the same month a year earlier. "The overall result was a decline of 2.7%," Levine said, and he cautioned that the drop leaves the city behind the 4.5% sales-tax growth assumed in the budget.
Levine said two timing factors drove the January shortfall. First, a very late Thanksgiving shifted some holiday spending into December, which would normally boost January collections. Second, the city changed many taxpayers' filing frequencies in 2024, moving some filers from annual or quarterly schedules to quarterly or monthly schedules. Levine said that change reduced the lump-sum tax remittances that had previously appeared in January, creating an uneven pattern in monthly comparisons.
Levine noted that his tracking of the roughly 200 largest monthly taxpayers shows growth of about 7% for that group and said those taxpayers account for roughly 80% of sales-tax revenue. "If you're asking how did retail sales do, I would use that as a proxy," he said. Levine added that a strong month of auto-related recoveries helped limit the damage to overall receipts.
Committee members asked a few follow-ups about related reports and timing. Levine said the staff expects the filing-frequency distortions to normalize over the coming months now that the change is about a year in effect. The committee accepted the consent-agenda item for the January 2025 sales tax chart with no objections.
Less-critical details: Levine said staff will stop repeatedly explaining the filing-frequency effect once the monthly pattern levels out; he also said his top-200 tracker is a rough sample rather than an exhaustive list.
