Deficit-Buster Perot Is Found To Have Old Debts to State

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Ross Perot, who this week unveiled a Web site devoted to criticizing the national budget deficit, appears to have a deficit of his own: more than $15,000 owed to New York State by his former presidential campaign and his company.

According to state filings, the New York headquarters of People for Perot owes $6,436.96 stemming from a sales tax that wasn’t paid in 1995. Mr. Perot’s Texas-based IT services company, Perot Systems, also owes $8,814.55 for an apparent failure to submit required paperwork in 2005. Mr. Perot ran for president in 1992 and 1996 on a platform of reducing the national debt.

Perot Systems’s penalty was originally $2,000, but interest had accrued until The New York Sun brought the fee to its attention yesterday. A company spokesman, James Fuller, said that while Perot Systems is not sure it actually owes the money, it will pay the sum listed on its books — about $1,800 less than the New York State Department of State’s figure — and sort out the situation later.

“We paid our $7,006.12, and it will be overnighted tomorrow to the State of New York,” he said. Mr. Fuller noted that the company has paid more than $3.6 million in taxes to the state since 2004.

The Department of Taxation and Finance declined to offer further details about the 13-year-old campaign debt, and a representative for Mr. Perot said the former candidate has no knowledge of the fees.

An official familiar with the tax law, and who saw the filing, took a guess as to what happened. “When the campaign ends, everybody disappears,” the official, who asked not to be identified, said. “They were probably getting mail for months and months, not just from us, and it’s going into some kind of bin.”

The debt was first reported on a Web site, webofdeception.com.


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