North Carolina treasurer to use $170M ‘found’ money to pay debt
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North Carolina Treasurer Brad Briner said he plans to use $170 million that he located in state accounts to pay down existing debt.
“The most important part of the Treasurer’s job is to review and maintain the finances of North Carolina,” said
“That money can be put to good use and we intend to do exactly that — reducing our outstanding debt to improve the fiscal health of the state,” he said.
The only legal options for the funds’ use is to refund debt or finance capital projects approved by the General Assembly or state voters.
The money has been accumulating since at least the early years of this century, a Treasury Department source said. It came from incomplete projects, projects that came in under budget and other reasons. Meanwhile, the money has earned interest.
The most recent annual comprehensive financial report “shows the funds were always properly accounted for, but were not previously identified as being able to be used for any purpose other than sitting in a savings account,” Briner said.
“The most efficient thing we can do with the funds is to retire state indebtedness — this will have a direct effect of lowering the amount of interest the state has to pay in the coming budget years,” Briner said. “And should the General Assembly or the voters decide that future debt issues are required for any reason, the debt capacity of the state for those future issues will be at least $170 million higher if we use all the funds for debt reduction.”
The department looked into the issue when it was “informed that the Department of State Treasurer was a large client of an institutional cash management firm,” Briner said. “Since we internally manage almost $50 billion of the North Carolina government monies, we didn’t understand why we would have a cash management relationship with an external firm.”
North Carolina had $5.7 billion in outstanding debt as of June 30, 2024, according to the state, most of it in bonds. It had $43.6 billion in own-source revenue in fiscal 2024, according to the state.
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