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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAri Berman, The Nation: Many Unanswered Questions About Romney's Taxes
http://www.thenation.com/blog/170797/many-unanswered-questions-about-romneys-taxes#Along with his missing Report on Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) from 2010, Romney should have released a 990-T form for his IRA, which is for unrelated business taxable income. That includes income from private equity accounts, which Romney has in his IRA. The fact that Romney hasnt released such a form suggests he owns them through an offshore blocker corporation, said Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel for Citizens for Tax Justice. That would be entirely at odds with his statement that his offshore investments have never saved him a dime in US income taxes.
Romneys massive, tax-free IRA is estimated to hold between $18 to $87 million. You can hardly get your head around it, said Wilkins. Congress never, ever anticipated that anyone would have $87 million in their IRA. Even by the standards of the super-rich, Romneys IRA is super-sized. Wilkins did tax planning for wealthy clients for twenty-one years and said, I never saw a $10 million retirement plancertainly never saw anything in neighborhood of $87 million. She said that, the Treasury is losing somewhere between 250,000 and $3 million a year in tax revenues on Romneys earnings from his IRA.
Then theres the manipulation of his tax returns from 19902009. We know almost nothing about them and theyre completely misleading, Wilkins said. The way PricewaterhouseCoopers computed the average rate was a total joke. The accounting firm took the rate from each year without accounting for how much Romney made in a given year. For example, if Romney paid 35 percent in taxes on $250,000 in income one year and 15 percent in taxes on $50 million another year, his weighted average is going to be a lot lower than what he reportedcloser to 15 percent, Wilkins said.
Romney has said, I never paid less than 13 percent in taxes, but theres no way to verify that claim based on the limited documentation his campaign has released. Nor can we say definitively that Harry Reid was wrong to suggest that Romney didnt pay any taxes for a decade. Unless we see the returns, you cant say thats not true, said Wilkins. Its quite possible there were some years when he never paid taxes.
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Ari Berman, The Nation: Many Unanswered Questions About Romney's Taxes (Original Post)
highplainsdem
Oct 2012
OP
bluerum
(6,109 posts)1. Why this isn't a huge concern to people voting for a president is beyond me.
malaise
(269,172 posts)2. Come on Harry Reid
Give me my Halloween October surprise