Mitt Romney's tax returns: the 'voter fraud' theory

Source: The Guardian


"There has been much speculation about why Romney refuses to disclose earlier tax returns. Could it be as simple as an address? Meanwhile, Romney appears to have escaped relatively unsinged from the apparently unrelated revelation that he may have committed voter fraud in January 2010, when – despite not owning a house in Massachusetts and having given every appearance of having moved to California – he registered and voted in the Massachusetts special election to replace the deceased Senator Ted Kennedy. Given the GOP's ongoing use of the "voter fraud" fable to justify modern Jim Crow laws and its highly-publicized persecution of the voter registration group Acorn, an actual case of felony voter fraud committed by the Republican nominee could have been a big story – but Romney was able to tamp down the flames by claiming, not very credibly but also not disprovably, that he and Ann actually were living in their son Tagg's Belmont, Massachusetts basement in 2010. Without proof that Romney lied about where he lived, there's no felony – and no big national story."

"Tax returns require taxpayers to state their residence address, and the Romney returns already produced, although partially redacted, state clearly that they lived in "Belmont, MA 02478" in 2012 (tax year 2011) (pdf) and 2011 (tax year 2010) (pdf)"

"But the Romneys, arbitrarily, refuse to disclose a copy of the returns they filed in 2010 or 2009 (for tax years 2009 and 2008) – which, perhaps not coincidentally, bracket the time period when Romney allegedly committed fraud by voting in Massachusetts when he actually resided in California. So here's the question: did Romney put his son's basement's address on the returns he filed in 2009 and 2010? Or did he truthfully use his real (non-Massachusetts) address, thus implicating himself in voter fraud?"



Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/17/mitt-romney-tax-returns-voter-fraud-theory?fb=optOut

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This is an issue in serious need of a panel of tax lawyers, of which I am not one. I also believe that the omission of the Romney's 2010 Form 990-T on his $100 million plus IRA funds needs further scrutiny:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/17/mitt-romney-2010-tax-unrelated-business_n_1798152.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&utm_hp_ref=politics

And last, but not least, his 2010 Report on Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) has not been disclosed either, which would identify whether he participated in the Tax Amnesty program for his Swiss UBS bank account. This FBAR, which has it's origin in the Bank Secrecy Act, holds civil penalties pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, the maximum civil penalty for a non-willful failure to file is $10,000. Criminal penalties range astronomically higher in contrast, in which case the subject would be really "fubar'd".