Fighting for his political survival, New York’s comptroller, Alan Hevesi, cleared an important hurdle yesterday by reaching an agreement with the attorney general’s office to reimburse the state an additional $33,000 for secretly using public employees as drivers and personal aides to his ailing wife.

Mr. Hevesi has agreed to pay back a total of $206,293.79, more than twice the amount he originally estimated that he owed the state when the scandal first erupted in September. He initially returned $82,000 and then put another $90,000 in an escrow account after the attorney general’s office began its inquiry.

Few additional damaging details emerged in the settlement, whose carefully worded language took weeks to negotiate. The attorney general’s investigation uncovered two additional employees who were briefly assigned as drivers to Carol Hevesi in 2003 and suggested that the comptroller made a sloppy attempt to estimate his debt to the state after the controversy became public. The attorney general’s findings represent the most comprehensive effort to create timesheets where none existed and to capture the full of scope of the services provided to his wife at the taxpayers’ expense.

Mr. Hevesi, who is facing a separate criminal inquiry by the Albany County district attorney, agreed to a final reimbursement figure without admitting or denying the office’s findings.

The agreement was reached as Mr. Hevesi’s political fate hangs in the balance. Critics of the comptroller say he has compromised his moral authority and should resign from his job as steward of state finances. His allies, including for the time being the Democratic speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, question the fairness of forcing him to step down and the wisdom of rejecting the will of voters who elected him to a second term in November by a 17-point margin.

Although there are balls still up in the air — the largest being the grand jury probe in Albany — the settlement helps to simplify Governor-elect Spitzer’s political calculation. Mr. Spitzer withdrew his endorsement of Mr. Hevesi before the election and questioned his ability to carry out his responsibilities, leading many to suspect that he would try to force him out of office.

But the disruptive consequences of an ouster and the legal battle it would trigger may act as a deterrent. With Governor Pataki unlikely to take any serious action and Mr. Hevesi giving no indication that he will step down, the governor-elect must decide whether to direct the Republican-controlled Senate to put Mr. Hevesi on trial.

Mr. Spitzer would need two-thirds of the Senate vote to remove Mr. Hevesi, who could hang on for months or years through appeals. There’s also a question of whether Mr. Hevesi is exonerated by an election in which most of the voters were aware of the scandal but voted for him anyway.

After the attorney general’s office announced the agreement, Mr. Hevesi released a statement that struck a balance between remorse and defiance. Saying he was “pleased” by the agreement, Mr. Hevesi said he has “taken full responsibility for my actions and have repeatedly apologized for my mistakes.”

But he said he “strongly” disagrees with conclusions drawn by the attorney general’s office that were based on an October report by the state’s Ethics Commission, which found “reasonable cause” to believe that the comptroller had violated New York public officers law.

The issue first came up in 2003 when the comptroller asked permission from the commission to assign a driver to his wife. At that point, a state employee was already being used to drive Mrs. Hevesi, a fact that Mr. Hevesi failed to mention in his initial request. The commission said she could have a driver for special security purposes and suggested to him that the state police conduct a risk assessment on his wife.

Mr. Hevesi, who as comptroller has occasionally received personal threats, has insisted that his wife, weakened by back, knee and heart surgery and driven to a suicide attempt in the 1990s, was in enough danger to justify the use of the drivers.

In its report on Mr. Hevesi, the ethics commission concluded that Mrs. Hevesi was not eligible for such special services, citing a 2003 state police report that found she faced a “low threat risk.” It also pointed out that the drivers assigned to Mrs. Hevesi were not part of the office’s security unit and lacked security training. The commission said it was doubtful that Mr. Hevesi had any intention of reimbursing the state and suspected that he owed more money than the $82,688.82 he had already returned.

After the commission completed its investigation, Mr. Spitzer directed two of his top deputies to investigate how much more money Mr. Hevesi owed. Mr. Spitzer recused himself from the case because he had endorsed Mr. Hevesi.

Using appointment books, e-mails, phone and computer logs, and security card swipe records provided by Mr. Hevesi and his office, the attorney general’s office reconstructed the whereabouts of Nicholas Acquafredda and three other state employees who provided services to Mrs. Hevesi. The attorney general’s office calculated Mr. Hevesi’s debt to the state by multiplying the daily rate of salary of the four employees by the number of days on which little or no data existed that proved they showed up in the office.

Mr. Acquafredda spent by far the most time with Mrs. Hevesi, accounting for almost $200,000 of the total reimbursement. Between June 2003 and June 2006, he was assigned to her on more than 500 days, becoming her full-time personal aide by the spring of 2005, the attorney general’s office found. Appointment entries written by Mrs. Hevesi showed that he drove her to and from personal appointments, acted as a lunch partner, and drove to her home in Somers, where he served as a home care aide after she had knee surgery, the findings say.

The three other employees spent a total of 31 workdays with Mrs. Hevesi in 2003, accumulating a tab of $11,228.29. The findings say Mr. Hevesi “omitted the fact that there were other employees who provided similar services to Mrs. Hevesi, including Burke, who had done so intermittently over the course of eight months.”

The findings also suggest that Mr. Hevesi made only a half-hearted attempt to calculate his debt after a tipster in his office leaked information about his failure to reimburse the state to the Republican Party’s comptroller nominee and the scandal became public. Mr. Hevesi’s deputy chief of staff, who was put in charge of coming up with an amount owed by the comptroller, consulted only one of Mr. Acquafredda’s direct supervisors and did not review computer records that could have helped to reconstruct the employee’s whereabouts. She described her method to the comptroller, who “did not modify or amend it. He did not direct her to seek or review any records to verify Acquafredda’s estimate,” the findings said.

Mr. Hevesi has 10 days to pay off the rest of the debt. The money must come from his personal funds, not campaign funds. He makes more than $300,000 a year from his comptroller’s salary and from pensions from his service as a Queens College professor, an assemblyman, and city comptroller.