Once sworn in as comptroller in January 1975, Bullock promised to modernize the office. During his sixteen years in office, Bullock pledged fair but aggressive audits. He made statewide headlines with a long series of "raids" on businesses that had collected state taxes from customers for many years but had not turned them in to the state. Bullock had pledged to secure these owed taxes; the officials collecting them were known as "Bullock's Raiders". As an outgrowth of his tax collecting efforts, that term entered the Texas government lexicon.