Choose Your Own Romney Tax Return Adventure
Posted by Michelle Moquin on 20th September 2012
Good morning!
Well, I’ve been back for a little bit but haven’t had much of a chance to connect with many of you. You know how it is when you leave town, and come back to a slew of e-mails and things that need to be handled, not to mention getting back to WORK. The work muscle was feeing a bit weak but I am pumped up now and back into it.
How is everyone doing? I see the blog comments are coming in strong. Lots to talk about these days. My thoughts keep going back to Romney’s revealing tape. It seems MSNBC is keeping it live. Not sure if any other media is even focusing on it. My guess is not so much. It also seems that Romney’s supporters are down in numbers, but again not so much. At least not as much as I thought after this illuminating tape went live, and even though republicans have shown they are distancing themselves from him.
What he said was sickening, and scary, and not the words that I would want to hear from a presidential candidate. The fact that the tape was done surreptitiously, tells you that what he was saying was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…so…help us God. You would think that any of the 47% (Half of the country!) he speaks of would just run far away from him, but racism runs deep – the numbers speak for themselves.
My feeling is this…it really doesn’t matter what happens before the election…how much foot Romney puts in his mouth, etc., (Although I am into it, and HOPEing that he continues to reveal his true self!) because the bottom line is, the republicans will try and steal the election. It doesn’t mean that we throw up our hands and say “Oh well, we’ve lost”, and give up. Oh no…we have to make it as difficult as possible for them to try. If we give up then, they won’t even have to steal it, we would have given it to them. So that is not an option. We must do our very best to get people to the polls and voting for Obama. It is the only way. As Mike, TM says, “There is nothing the Right will not try to steal this election”. We have to be just as vigilant and do everything we can possible do to prevent them. I’m in. I HOPE you are too.
Before I post a topic, here’s a notice that we all should know about. You can’t miss this:
Tomorrow in New Orleans, President Barack Obama and GOP Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan will speak at AARP’s Life@50+ event and answer questions from AARP members across the country.
What: A conversation with President Obama and GOP VP Nominee Ryan
When: Friday, Sept. 21 (Obama at 10:45 AM CDT, Ryan at 11:30 AM CDT)
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And since I am still on the topic of Romney, and his refusal of showing his tax returns is still a hot topic, and rightly so, this is an excellent article because it reminds people that Romney must have something to hide in his taxes that is so devastating that he is willing to take the chance that he can win by not showing them, than to risk certain rejection if that information is known.
Choose Your Own Romney Tax Return Adventure

By only releasing two years of tax information (and just one tax return), Mitt Romney has done something really fun: given us a mystery to solve! Reporters are siccing tax experts on the few extant bits of documentary evidence about Romney’s taxes to extrapolate what all the returns from before 2010 might contain. Here’s what the sleuths have come up with so far.
Theory: Mitt Romney paid no taxes in 2009.
Theorist: Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Joshua Green
Evidence: The financial crisis in 2008 cost the ultra-rich (wealth above $30 million) an average of 25 percent of their net worth, Green says. Romney fits in that category, and he probably felt major losses. “And it’s possible he suffered a large enough capital loss that, carried forward and coupled with his various offshore tax havens, he wound up paying no U.S. federal taxes at all in 2009,” Green writes.
Counter-evidence: Romney’s campaign denied Wednesday that Romney has ever had a $0 tax bill, Politico’s Alexander Burns reports.

Theory: Romney had a secret Swiss bank account, and revealed it under the IRS’s amnesty program in 2009.
Theorist: Slate’s Matt Yglesias, New York University’s Daniel Shaviro (sort of)
Evidence: Romney had a Swiss bank account, which the lawyer managing his blind trust closed in late 2010. In 2008, a whistleblower at UBS, the Swiss bank where Romney had his account, told the IRS about 4,000 American account holders. The IRS offered an amnesty deal for account-holders who came forward in 2009. Yglesias speculates:
“Romney might well have thought in 2007 and 2008 that there was nothing to fear about a non-disclosed offshore account he’d set up years earlier precisely because it wasn’t disclosed. But then came the settlement and the rush of non-disclosers to apply for the amnesty. Failing to apply for the amnesty and then getting charged by the IRS would have been both financially and politically disastrous. So amnesty it was.”
Why else would Romney want a Swiss bank account, Shaviro told the Huffington Post. “It’s unclear why he would have valued the Swiss bank account secrecy, and it wouldn’t have enabled him legally to avoid U.S. tax… This is why there’s speculation that he was into the amnesty program.”
Counter-evidence: Bloomberg’s Barro explains that Romney listed a “UBS Money Market Account” in a Federal Election Commission disclosure form in 2007. It wasn’t “clearly flagged as Swiss, but it’s there,” Barro says. (Romney failed to report earned interest income on the $3 million account in a 2011 disclosure form, and had to amend it.) “It’s possible that Romney told the FEC about the account while hiding it from the IRS, but that doesn’t seem very smart.”
(Photo via T@H!R via Flickr.)
Theory: Romney might have used his Swiss bank account to hide problematic transactions, like “any politically unpopular investments, clever and complex asset sales designed to lower Romney’s tax bills.”
Theorist: The Huffington Post’s Zach Carter and Ryan Grim
Evidence: When Romney released his 2010 tax return, he did not release a separate document required by the IRS, called a Report on Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, or FBAR. Romney would have needed to file an FBAR in his foreign accounts, because not doing so would incur a big fine. Other foreign accounts that didn’t generate income, but instead just executed transactions, would not show up on the tax return, but would show up on the FBAR. “Romney may not have engaged in any of those activities” listed above, the Huffington Post says, “but his as-yet-unreleased 2010 FBAR would make it easier to determine whether or not he did.”
Counter-evidence: Just as there is no real evidence for this speculation, there is no counter-evidence yet.

Theory: Romney might have engaged in “aggressive tax planning strategies that are legally, but not politically, defensible.”
Theorist: Bloomberg’s Josh Barro, New York University School of Law tax professor Daniel Shaviro, The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy, The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent
Evidence: Barro took a look at Green’s theory, and found that though Romney’s taxes show he had no taxable capital gains in 2009, he had other income. Even with a lot of deductions, “it’s unlikely that these factors alone could have added up to a tax bill of $0. Of the 35,000 high income taxpayers with no tax due in 2009, by far the largest share achieved that feat by investing heavily in tax-exempt municipal bonds.” Romney was not heavily invested in municipal bonds. So if Romney has something politically damaging in his tax returns, it’s probably something else, like aggressive tax planning strategies. Likewise, Shaviro says:
Still, willingness to do extremely aggressive tax sheltering (such as through loss generation from circular flows of cash) in 2009 would not come as a huge surprise, even though it seems like a dumb idea if you are preparing to run for president again.
Cassidy notes that while Romney’s tax preparers might have had politics in mind in 2010 and 2011, they might not have thought about that in earlier years.
Counter-evidence: There is no counter-evidence so far, unless you count Tim Pawlenty telling CBS Wednesday that Romney’s “paid a lot of taxes.”
(Photo via Images_of_Money via Flickr.)
Theory: The taxes might just show Romney made a ton of money, had more offshore accounts, and made controversial investments.
Theorist: The New Yorker‘s John Cassidy (sort of)
Evidence: Cassidy seems to think the most likely reason Romney won’t show us the tax returns is that he paid an even lower tax rate than the 14 percent shown on the 2010 taxes. But there are other possibilities. Romney’s retirement agreement with Bain ended in 2009, and “quite probably it allowed Romney to keep pocketing a substantial portion of the firm’s profits.” Or maybe before 2010, Romney’s money managers “were even more aggressive in their use of overseas investment vehicles and tax shields.” Or maybe Bain invested in controversial firms like the medical waste company that disposes of aborted fetuses, a potential problem because ‘even after he left, kept much of his money in investment funds managed by the firm.”
Counter-evidence: Cassidy thinks these three theories are unlikely, because Romney’s name is already tied to the first two — being rich and having offshore accounts — and the controversial investments wouldn’t be worth all this tax return headache.
Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at ereeve@nationaljournal.com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
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Readers: And no, I haven’t even begun to read the 90 something comments that came in yesterday. Buy hey, blog me anyway.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog. If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
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