WHITE HOUSE ADMITS INACCURACY.

Byline: John Solomon Associated Press 

The White House discovered in 1995 that its former chief of administration had given inaccurate testimony to Congress but failed to correct the matter with House members until last week, documents show.

The White House is calling the incorrect testimony an honest mistake and says its failure to promptly correct the matter when it was discovered was due to ``inadvertence and the press of business,'' according to a letter obtained by the Associated Press.

``This was obviously something that should have been fixed a long time ago, and we very much regret that it wasn't,'' White House spokesman Barry Toiv said Saturday.

Then-director of White House administration Patsy Thomasson told a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in March 1994 she was unaware of any volunteers working at the White House who were being paid by outside entities.

``To my knowledge, Mr. Istook, there are no people working at the White House as volunteers who are getting paid by someone else,'' Thomasson answered under questioning from Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla.

But last month, the White House disclosed that a handful of volunteers who worked at the White House during President Clinton's first term actually had been compensated by the Democratic National Committee.

The White House says it believes the practice of having volunteers paid by outside sources was legal, but it has moved to stop it anyway in the aftermath of the uproar over Democratic fund-raising practices.

Thomasson, a longtime Arkansas friend of Clinton, no longer heads the White House office of administration, but works in the personnel office. She emerged as a key figure during the Whitewater investigation because she was one of four people to search the office of the late deputy counsel Vincent Foster on the night of his apparent suicide.

The White House on Friday wrote the current chairman of the subcommittee that was given the incorrect testimony, Arizona Republican Jim Kolbe, to apologize.

``We deeply regret that oversight,'' wrote Nelson W. Cunningham, the general counsel for the White House office of administration.

The disclosure comes at a sensitive time for the White House, which in recent weeks has been forced to alter major portions of its official account about the Democratic fund-raising controversy in the face of contradictory evidence.

Just last week, it was learned that the president personally approved the use of coffees and overnight stays at the White House to encourage donors to give more. Earlier, the president had blamed most of the tactics on a wayward Democratic National Committee.

In its letter to Kolbe, the White House acknowledged Thomasson's testimony was incorrect. ``Unbeknownst to Ms. Thomasson, there were approximately 11 individuals then working at the White House who were paid by the DNC,'' it said.