Governor Bev Perdue plans to borrow five hundred million dollars from several state accounts to help pay tax refunds.
Governor Perdue says there's not enough money in the state's rainy day fund to cover the cost of all the tax refunds the state has begun to process. But she says there is enough money in about a dozen other funds that she can use.
"We have gone to existing pots of money and are doing interfund transfers to allow us to have a corpus to make these tax refunds on overpayments timely, the 30 to 45 days. and if you do it with these interfund transfers, you're not paying your bills, you're getting people the money that they're owned."
The Democratic governor says the money will be repaid with interest before July first. But Republicans criticize the governor for using money they wanted her to dip into to help ease a looming budget shortfall.