House Bank Bounced Some Checks of Solarz, 8 Others : Overdrafts: New Yorker leads list with 64 returned. Records show he once was behind by more than $23,000.

Although the House bank routinely allowed members of Congress to write unlimited overdrafts, Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.) and eight other lawmakers wrote some checks that even this lenient bank returned for insufficient funds, congressional documents showed Wednesday.

Of nearly 20,000 bad checks written by 66 current or former House members whose accounts were examined by the General Accounting Office, only 120 actually were “bounced” by returning them to the sender, the documents indicated.

Solarz, who was notified Wednesday by the House Ethics Committee that he is among the 24 current or former members of the House labeled the worst “abusers” of the bank, led the list of nine members by having 64 checks returned during a 39-month period ending last Oct. 3.

The next highest number of returned checks--31--was attributed to Rep. Carl C. Perkins (D-Ky.), who already has announced his retirement from Congress after this term.

Banking records leaked from the committee said Solarz wrote a whopping 743 checks without enough funds to cover them and at one point his negative balance climbed to more than $23,000, or about 20% of his annual salary.

Many lawmakers who discovered that they had overdrawn their accounts previously complained that the casually managed House bank never returned a check or notified them that checks were being held awaiting the deposit of the next monthly paycheck.

In a statement issued after his name was disclosed, Solarz said: “No rules were violated--indeed, no one from the House bank ever informed me, or anyone on my staff, that we were violating, let alone abusing, the rules of the House.”

With members seeking to explain away their banking practices, Solarz and the other lawmakers who actually bounced checks may face an additional burden, since they may not be able to claim that they never knew they were in arrears.

As one of Congress’ outstanding experts on foreign affairs, Solarz was the leading Democrat in the House who backed President Bush’s call for the use of force against Iraq last year. He is the fourth-ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Solarz said he has found “a lot of inaccuracies and errors” in the bank’s records. “Obviously, there were a lot of mistakes, and, if I had known that the practices of this so-called bank were as slipshod as they were, I certainly would not have put my money there,” he told a reporter.

Other members and the number of their checks that were returned, the documents showed, are Rep. Harold E. Ford (D-Tenn.), 12; Rep. Ronald D. Coleman (D-Tex.), 6, and Rep. Charles Hatcher (D-Ga.), 2. Four other members--whose names could not be learned--had one check returned.

Several of those House members have assembled accountants and lawyers to try to convince the committee that an error was made and to persuade them to remove their names from the politically damaging list.

To make the list, a member had to write overdrafts for more than his or her next month’s salary for eight months or more during the 39-month period of scrutiny.

Rep. Charles Wilson (D-Tex.), who was found to have written 81 bad checks and overdrawn his paycheck for eight months, was hoping to find enough bank errors to reduce the number of months to seven. He said his staff has found three examples of deposits made at the end of a week that were not credited until the following week, although his checks continued to be cashed.