Ari Berman, The Nation: Many Unanswered Questions About Romney's 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 hasn’t 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.”

Romney’s 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, Romney’s IRA is super-sized. Wilkins did tax planning for wealthy clients for twenty-one years and said, “‘I never saw a $10 million retirement plan—certainly 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 Romney’s earnings from his IRA.”

Then there’s the manipulation of his tax returns from 1990–2009. “We know almost nothing about them and they’re 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 reported—closer to 15 percent,” Wilkins said.

Romney has said, “I never paid less than 13 percent” in taxes, but there’s 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 didn’t pay any taxes for a decade. “Unless we see the returns, you can’t say that’s not true,” said Wilkins. “It’s quite possible there were some years when he never paid taxes.”

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