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A document shows New Jersey's budget shortfall was almost $275 million bigger than expected

(Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)

TRENTON — The shortfall for the budget year that ended June 30 was even worse than Gov. Chris Christie anticipated, a new document shows.

Buried 45 pages into a state bond document filed today is a disclosure that the budget shortfall for the last fiscal year was nearly $275 million higher than than the $1.3 billion the administration had estimated at the end of June.

“Cash collections of major state revenues for Fiscal Year 2014 through the end of June, 2014 were $274.9 million less than at the time such certification was made,” reads the document.

According to the bond filing, the biggest contributor to the shortfall was corporate business tax collections, which were off by $208 million.

In the spring, the Christie administration was predicting an $800 million shortfall in its $33 billion budget for fiscal year 2014. But that grew nearly twice as large by the end of the budget year, once all the bills were tallied, nearing $1.6 billion, according to today's bond filing. The gap prompted Christie to cut the state's payments into the pension system over two fiscal years, prompting lawsuits from public workers unions, and a credit downgrade by Fitch last week.

"The predictions have just been off. That’s one of the reasons that our bond rating keeps going down," said state Sen. Linda Greenstein (D-Mercer), a member of the budget committee. "I’m really not surprised by it. I’m just dismayed.”

A spokesman for the Department of Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The latest shortfall of $274.9 million is just within the $300 million the Christie administration counted on as a surplus, or rainy-day fund, in the budget. Just days before the budget year ended, the unions suing the Christie had called on him to pour the budget surplus into the pension system. The Christie administration argued that would be reckless because the surplus might not materialize when all of the state’s bills came due.