US federal budget deficit drops to $27.4 bn

The US federal government reported a budget deficit of $27.4 billion in January, the US Treasury Department said on Friday.

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

In the first four months of the 2012 fiscal year, budget deficit amounted to $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 $1.1 trillion in this fiscal year ending September 2012.

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