Not following you here either. The text you supplied stipulates “undisclosed foreign accounts”. Is it your assertion that Romney has undisclosed foreign accounts?
No. You keep confusing corporate income tax with personal income tax. We are talking about amnesty for the latter.
If you have foreign assets you have to file an FBAR. Lots of people were not disclosing all of their foreign assets on this. The IRS provided amnesty if you would declare everything.
Here is the IRS FAQ about the 2009 OVDP: http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=210027,00.html. There was a new one in 2011, and I believe the rules on voluntary disclosure are changing again at the end of this year.
The 2009 amnesty was about tax evasion, not offshore deferral. If it’s true that Romney’s not disclosing because he participated in the 2009 amnesty, the logical implication is that he had been evading taxes prior to that–which is illegal.
Not only that, I was under the impression that you* were, as well.
*“you” in this instance referring to magellan01, not jayjay.
P.S. in the event that you thought everyone was discussing the corporate tax amnesty, please explain how his participation in such a program would be reflected in any personal tax returns he might putatively release.
From the article you supplied, I’m not getting that that was what happened with O’Brien. It seems to have been his response to Kennedy. And for that, I still don’t have adequate information, as I’ve already outlined.
The article you supplied also explains that Romney decided to take a principled stance as a matter of “privacy”. As you know (from the article), this was bandied about for months in his campaign against O’Brien. Evidently the voters (in a blue state, I’d add), didn’t think Romney was being unreasonable.
What are you so desperate for me to admit? It’s very likely that if O’Brien said, "I’m not going to release my tax returns as an issue of “privacy”, Romney would have most likely been fine with that, as that was his reason, as well. It appear, and this is conjecture on my part, that once O’Brien released her returns, that Romney wanted her to release her husband’d returns as well, lest the electorate get a a beautiful, yet incomplete, picture.
Thank you for the clarification. If this is what people are concerned about, they just need to ask him, no? At this point, he’d be a fool to lie about it. He could then either ask the people to believe him, or supply some supporting documentation, like a tax return for the year in question. Or at least the part of it that would substantiate his claim.
Bingo. They have been asking, and his answers have been evasive. And he hasn’t released returns to substatiate the claim that everything is above board. Until he releases the returns, as is standard, many people are going to believe that he is choosing not to release the returns because of something like taking advantage of amnesty (the issue in the returns, if there is one, that romney doesn’t want exposed, if that is his reason for not providing returns, may not be amnesty..it’s just that is what most tax experts believe to be the most likely possibility. But tax law is complex, and tax shelters for the very wealthy are very complex, and it’s impossible to ask direct questions about all the possibilities on the return. He would be answering nothing but questions on his return from now until the election. And he’s already indicated that, although he is responsible legally for what is on his return, his accountants handle that).
SNIP" All the while, Romney called on his Democratic opponent Shannon O’Brien to release her husband’s tax returns, according to an April 17, 2002 article in The Boston Globe, O’Brien had already made her tax returns public.
At the time, Fehrnstrom defended the disparity:
He suggested O’Brien was being disingenuous by releasing only her returns, whereas Romney took a “principled position” against releasing his tax returns at all, by citing privacy concerns."
Read more: Mitt Romney Refused Tax Return Release in 2002 Running for Massachusetts Governor - Business Insider
At this point, if you tell me there’s something here you can’t get, I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it, but demanding other people’s tax returns, while refusing to release your own under a 'principled stand of privacy" JUST DOESN’T SEEM THAT HARD TO GRASP!
Assuming he hasn’t been asked already, I suspect the answer would be something like “Kiss my ass.” Romney is really not fond of taking questions.
Hooray! Now you understand exactly what he hasn’t done!
:smack: Of course! Why has no one, not even in the media, thought to *ask *him anything about this? Amazing!
Well, to be honest, it sounds like Romney was saying "I don’t think anyone should have to release their taxes. That’s private. So I’m not going to.
But if someone is going to release taxes, they should release their whole immediate family’s taxes, or else they are being disingenuous when they try to give the appearance of disclosure."
Whether you agree with the reasoning, there’s nothing blatantly hypocritical about this line. It looks like he wasn’t demanding she release her information–just saying that if she’s going to release it she is not really doing what she’s trying to give the impression she’s doing unless she also has her spouse release his information.
You could make the exact same point about Romney’s decision to release two years of tax returns- not to mention his campaign’s gripe that they’ve already released more than “required.”
I don’t understand why you’re pointing that out.
To expand: If your equivalence follows, that’s fine, and Romney’s welcome to it, since he’s the one who made the argument. I was paraphrasing it, not endorsing it.
Thank you. I said, in essence, the same thing, but you put it much better.
We’re in partial agreement here. I think it might be wise for him to release a specific return, Or better, a portion of one, to substantiate a claim he has made. But substantiating a particular claim does not warrant releasing all his returns. I thinking he’d doing the wise thing here. Too many jackals whop don’t care an iota about the truth. And then there are all those lefties outside the SDMB. 
“I’m not going to do that because my opponents would make hay with it.” That seems like a really bad way to go about making decisions. If releasing tax returns is a good thing to do, then he should release them. If releasing tax returns is a bad thing to do, then he shouldn’t release them and he shouldn’t have released what he did.
It’s just a weird situation. If you’re worried that someone will misrepresent you, get out ahead of it and represent yourself. Explain it in detail and weather the storm (in a teacup). If the other returns look just like the one he released, then he’s choosing the absolute worst possible way of handling this. He’s taking the hit for the low tax rate AND taking the hit for being secretive. Baffling.
Unless, of course, the other returns don’t look just like this one. Then something inexplicable turns explicable. It’s like having someone say, “I have not committed any sort of crime since last week.” Couple that with his seeming petulance over the issue and it’s just shady looking.
Mind you, I like that he’s looking shady. I want him to lose. I want him to be crushed, really. And this story doesn’t help him (even if it doesn’t end up hurting him too much). I can’t even figure out what would make me more amused: If he’s hiding nothing, which means he’s taking this crap for no reason at all, or if he’s hiding something toxic. Either way, he’s kinda dumb.
Except that if he doesn’t release the “standard” six to eight years (four on the light end, twelve on the heavy), this won’t leave the news cycle. People will wonder how he cherry picked his returns.
By not releasing the returns, he’s created the suspicion that he is hiding something. If he cherry picks their release, it will just be “can we figure out what he’s hiding by what he chose to release.”
For Romney, this needs to leave the news cycle. The only way to do that is squeeky clean returns in plenty of time for them to be looked over with a fine tooth comb - and on the heavy end - eight to twelve years. It took down Mondale (via Ferraro.)
I do audit for a living now (not tax, though). One of the worst things you can do in a sample audit is to let the auditor think you are cherry picking your data.
If he wanted a private life, a different career would have been a good choice. Running for president means that people dig up every skeleton in your closet. They look at your tax returns, at the women you flirted with that weren’t your wife, at the things your minister says from the podium, at the papers you wrote in college, and whether or not you inhaled. They question how many times you showed up for duty in the National Guard. They wonder why you were on a plane eight plus months pregnant with a high risk pregnancy thousands of miles from home. Every decision you make is put under the microscope. If that isn’t your cup of tea (and it sure the hell isn’t mine), do something else for a living. Run capital firms and buy and sell companies. Be a community organizer. Own a baseball team. Or sit on your money (since few of these guys are poor). Is that fair? Maybe or maybe not. I think any suspicion of tax evasion is very relevant in a presidential candidate, where I’m not sure cheating on your wife is - but this is politics, and has been since John Adams was accused of having a French mistress and rumors of Sally Hemmings flew.
He’s really been backed into a corner now -
- If he releases the returns, it looks like he has “caved” to Reid’s pressure
- If he doesn’t release, then the other side continues to make hay of the situation and throw accusations of wrong doing.
So then how?
Perhaps one way out - get someone to “leak” his returns (ala wikileaks style).
What’s gonna happen then?
The returns are out there - so pressure is off Romney, at the same time he gets to scream and shout about dishonesty and underhandeness of the way they were released.
And on top of that, if there is anything bad in the documents - he gets to claim that they were “doctored” before they were released.