Low corporation tax revenue: who could have predicted it?

To govern is to plan ahead. This is particularly true of tax revenue: higher-than-expected takings at the end of 1999 triggered the ‘surplus’ political crisis, from which the then Minister for the Economy never fully recovered¹; conversely, lower-than-expected tax receipts often mark the start of a budgetary crisis such as the one we are currently experiencing in France. The 2025 draft Finance Bill thus reveals a shortfall of more than 40 billion euros between compulsory levies (PO) for 2024 as forecast in September 2023 and their revised estimate a year later. More than a third of the 2024 error stems from corporation tax (IS) alone,