IANS | 11 Feb, 2012
The US federal government reported a budget deficit of USD 27.4 billion in January, the US Treasury Department said Friday.

The figure is sharply lower than the reading of USD 50 billion a year earlier. Much of the decline was due to accounting changes. The federal government raked in a revenue of USD 234.3 billion in January, and registered outlays of USD 261.7 billion, it said.

In the first four months of the 2012 fiscal year, budget deficit amounted to USD 349 billion, Xinhua reported.

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan budgetary agency, forecast last week that the federal government would run a budget deficit of around USD 1.1 trillion in this fiscal year ending September 2012.

The US federal government registered a budget deficit of about USD 1.3 trillion for the 2011 fiscal year. It marked the third fiscal year in a row that the government budget exceeded the USD 1-trillion threshold.