figures as filed with the Department of Taxation. He

figures as filed with the Department of Taxation.

He explained that retailers remit the sales tax due to the Department of Taxation in the month following the sales. Thus, sales tax records and payments for December’s Christmas season sales were arriving at the Department’s Richmond office just as the two mid-winter snowstorms in late January ground the Commonwealth to a halt.

The subsequent delay in processing the receipts produced a statistical drop of 17.8 percent in retail sales for December, Mr. Pearson said. “From the Bureau’s sample of retail merchants and other reports, we know that retail sales actually were up significantly in December, not down.”

The problem in reporting the data was compounded when the sales tax receipts which arrived late were processed by the Department of Taxation in February, along with the records for January sales. That, Mr. Pearson said, generated “spectacular” increases in the Department’s recorded sales tax receipts for January sales. In three areas sales skyrocketed by more than 75 percent.

Contrasted with what he termed a “statistical aberration,” Mr. Pearson said that the Bureau’s sampling of retail merchants showed a small decline in actual sales during January. In sum, he said, the Department’s figures shifted some of December’s seasonably large volume of taxable sales to the normally slow month of January, which made the reported figures for each month unrealistic.

The Bureau’s solution, Mr. Pearson said, was to average the two months together, then compare the figure with the average of the figures from December ’85/January ’86 to arrive at the percentage gain. .

That averaged figure shows an 11.2 percent rise over the anmo fig. ure last year. Nationwide, excluding the automobile sales component, the average was 4.6 percent, which indi