Tax collections for last month were down by 17 percent from last August, but Okamura said that was mostly because the end of the month fell on a weekend. That meant that taxes normally due on the last day of August could instead be paid on the first business day in September.

That pushed millions of dollars in tax collections from August to September, meaning those collections do not appear on the August tax collections statistics released yesterday.

Thus far in the fiscal year that began July 1, the state general treasury has collected almost

$520 million in taxes, which is about 3.3 percent less than was collected in the first two months of last year.

Gov. Ben Cayetano said he will be briefed on the budget situation later this week, but is not inclined to impose new budget cuts. "Right now I'm not going to recommend any kind of severe restrictions," he said. "I've had enough of that."

In particular, Cayetano said he will not impose major restrictions on education or social services.

"There's enough (money) there that we can use different kinds of funding to get us past the hump, because some of the economists have already predicted that we are on our way to recovery, and in fact have predicted 2 percent growth, which is modest but it's better than most of the Mainland states," he said.