State of Idaho ends 2024 fiscal year with $52.5M revenue surplus

The Idaho State Capitol rotunda is pictured in this Jan. 23, 2024, photo. (Otto Kitsinger for Idaho Capital Sun)

Despite revenue shortfalls in the spring, the state of Idaho ended the 2024 fiscal year with a budget surplus and will have $76.5 million to put toward reducing property taxes, Gov. Brad Little’s budget chief said Tuesday.

Overall, the state finished the 2024 fiscal year on June 30 with a $52.5 million revenue surplus, Idaho Division of Financial Management Administrator Lori Wolff said. But because state agencies were able to return $24 million in unspent money at the end of the fiscal year, the amount of money available for property tax reductions increased to $76.5 million, Wolff said.

Under a so-called “surplus eliminator” clause in House Bill 292 that was passed during the 2023 legislative session, a year-end budget surplus is to be directed toward property tax reductions.

“Revenues in June were a little bit better than expected and we made up that difference,” Wolff said in a phone interview.

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The surplus was welcome news to Wolff. State revenues missed the mark in April and May. In June, Wolff told state legislators on the budget committee not to expect another big budget surplus . But revenues ended up beating the forecast in June and making up the difference.

On Tuesday evening, Little issued a written statement highlighting the revenue surplus and funding for property taxes

“What Idaho is doing is working,” Little wrote. “Our conservative approach to governing means we encourage economic prosperity, we rein in government spending, and we manage our budget with money to spare, unlike Washington, D.C.”

Idaho runs on a fiscal year calendar that begins July 1 and ends June 30. The 2024 fiscal year ended June 30, and the 2025 fiscal year began July 1.

Little and Wolff also said that the bond credit rating group Moody’s Corp upgraded Idaho’s sales tax bond and school guarantee program as “AAA” up from AA+. Wolff and Little said that the upgraded bond rating is further evidence of the health of Idaho’s economy and will help the state receive more favorable interest rates.

Transition to Luma delayed state’s ability to final year-end budget numbers

Wolff said it took a few additional weeks to finalize the year end numbers because the state was using the Luma business system for the first time. Wolff originally hoped to have final numbers in late July. Instead, she told the Sun the state finalized the fiscal year-end numbers earlier this week.

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“We haven’t done it before (using Luma) so we wanted to make sure we got it right and worked closely with State Controller (Brandon) Woolf and his team, but it took longer than we are used to,” Wolff said. “But a lot of that was we wanted to make sure everything balanced at the end of the day. We feel confident in the numbers.”

Luma is a massive statewide cloud-based system that centralizes all of the state’s business, procurement, budgeting, payroll, human resources and financial management systems for all state agencies and all state employees. State officials launched Luma on July 1, 2023, to replace business systems that dated to the 1980s, were vulnerable to security threats and had outlived their usable lifespan.

But Luma’s first year up and running has been rocky. Most state employees had not completed basic Luma training before the system’s launch, the Idaho Capita Sun previously reported . A series of technical and data entry errors were attributed to Luma for months. And a series of audits released to the Idaho Legislature in June found Luma was missing data security controls and that operational inefficiencies and data inaccuracies disrupted processes and affected productivity, the Sun previously reported . At one point an eastern Idaho fire safety nonprofit organization reported it hadn’t been paid by the state in months because of issues with Luma.

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