WASHINGTON -- President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton paid $14,615 in back taxes and interest yesterday to cover previously undisclosed profits from Mrs. Clinton's 1980 commodities trading, the White House disclosed.

In a tense White House briefing for reporters, lawyers for the first family conceded that earlier statements they had made about Mrs. Clinton's commodities deals were "inoperative" and that Mrs. Clinton had made a profit of $6,498 in 1980 that was never reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

"The Clintons do not know how the error occurred but accept responsibility for it," said David E. Kendall, the Clintons' personal attorney.

For 1980, the year in question, the Clintons reported total income of $87,556. They paid taxes of $17,579.

The tax records and statements released at the White House yesterday showed that the Clintons underpaid their federal taxes by $3,315 that year. They also underpaid the state of Arkansas $514.

Mr. Kendall said that the state of Arkansas and the Internal Revenue Service compute interest differently, and so the total that was repaid yesterday came to $13,449 to the federal government and $1,166 to the state.

Mr. Kendall and White House Cabinet secretary John Podesta, also a lawyer, tried to put the best face on this development and noted that because the Clintons' transgressions occurred so long ago, they were not obligated to pay a dime.

"Here, the Clintons reached back 14 years to a time long closed by the IRS and, after careful investigation, have made the determination themselves to pay, not only the tax, but also interest for that entire period," said Mr. Kendall.

But privately, top White House officials admitted that however they dressed up the news, it wasn't very good politics for the first family to be admitting to the American people -- only four days before tax day -- that they once had significantly underpaid their taxes.

Moreover, it again drew attention to Mrs. Clinton's controversial dealings in the high-risk commodities market.

Separate accounts

The unreported income does not involve the controversial account with the Refco brokerage office in Springdale, Ark., in which Mrs. Clinton made a $99,000 profit in a 10-month whirlwind of trading, mostly on cattle futures, in a series of transactions that numerous commodities experts have described as highly unusual for a first-time investor.

Instead, it concerns a separate account, opened with Stephens Inc. of Little Rock, on Oct. 12, 1979, with $5,000.

Previously, Mr. Podesta and Lisa Caputo, Mrs. Clinton's spokeswoman, said that the first lady had lost $1,000 on this account and then closed it before her daughter Chelsea was born because she got cold feet and was distracted by her pregnancy.

But the White House acknowledged yesterday that, instead, Mrs. Clinton had doubled her money on the Stephens account and that trading had continued three months after Chelsea was born.

Over the weekend, Mr. Podesta acknowledged that his previous claim that Mrs. Clinton had made all her own trades was not true, either. James B. Blair, the Arkansas attorney who steered Mrs. Clinton into the commodities markets, had actually ordered the trades himself, although White House officials continued to insist that Mrs. Clinton actually made the decisions on the trading.

"I think it's become clear that he [Mr. Blair] placed most of the trades," White House spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said.

Broker's discretion

The trades in Mrs. Clinton's second account were apparently made at the discretion of her Stephens broker, Bill Smith, according to Mr. Kendall's statement.

Asked how Mrs. Clinton could have failed to report her 1980 capital gains on her tax return, Mr. Kendall and other White House officials pointed to the complexities of the Stephens account and suggested that this may have caused some confusion because, through Stephens, Mrs. Clinton was trading in commodities, stocks and bonds with three different brokers.

"Stephens Inc. prepared annual year-end statements on which the Clintons and their CPA relied for the preparation of the family's tax returns," said Mr. Kendall.

But the year-end reports submitted to the Clintons by Stephens are clearly marked with the caveat that the information on them ** "is not necessarily an accurate figure for your tax purposes."

Mr. Kendall also conceded that Mrs. Clinton received monthly reports from Stephens that would have contained information about her capital gains.

Tax record responsibility

Several tax experts noted yesterday that the law requires all taxpayers to keep track of their income each year. And they said that the IRS would have assessed penalties if their failure to report the income had been caught at the time.

Mr. Kendall could not explain yesterday why Mrs. Clinton did not recognize that she owed capital gains taxes after investing $5,000 with Stephens in 1979, taking a tax loss of slightly more than $1,000 on the account that year, and then removing $10,489 when she closed the account in 1980.

Ronald A. Pearlman, former chief of staff of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation and one of four tax lawyers the White House recently invited reporters to contact about their returns, said that the underpayment did not appear to rise to the level of civil fraud.

But, he said, had the underpayment been discovered by the IRS within the time period covered by the statute of limitations, the Clintons would have been subject to a 5 percent negligence penalty plus back taxes and interest.

The statute of limitation for such a mistake is normally three years, tax experts said, and five years for a criminal case, which only occurs when there is deliberate deception.

New trading records

Along with the new tax information, the White House released a fresh batch of Mrs. Clinton's commodity trading records from her Refco account. Still missing were detailed records of her original $1,000 investment, which apparently yielded an overnight profit of $5,300.

The White House also released an assessment of her commodities dealings from Leo Melamed, former chairman of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Mr. Melamed says that although Mrs. Clinton was "thinly margined," which means she didn't put up enough capital to cover her losses, and even though some of her trades were placed by other, well-informed advisers, he found no evidence of improper activities regarding the account that some critics have suggested may have taken place.

The most serious allegation is that the trades were "allocated," meaning that at the end of the day, her broker, Robert L. "Red" Bone, assigned winning transactions to Mrs. Clinton and losers to other traders.

"On the basis of Mrs. Clinton's transactions, there is no evidence of favorable trade allocation," said Mr. Melamed, who said he detected no violations of any kind.

"What these records show is that Mrs. Clinton was, during 1978 and 1979, a relatively modest trader . . . [who] paid normal, full commissions. She made money on a lot of trades, lost money on some . . . and, on balance, she did extremely well."