Willard's Tax Evasion And Tax Fraud

( The image above is from mariopiperni.com.)

There is little doubt anymore that Willard Mitt Romney is a tax evader, and probably even has committed tax fraud. He has refused to release even one year of a full tax return, and it is likely that he has done that to hide the multitude of ways he has managed to evade paying American taxes. We know he has multiple overseas accounts in several countries (including the Cayman Islands, long known as a tax haven for the rich).

But we don't know how many millions of dollars he is hiding in those accounts. We don't know because the one partial tax return he has released is missing the required page for foreign investments and accounts. It's quite possible that he's hiding hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid paying U.S. taxes on that money. This is not illegal, but it is certainly unethical -- especially for someone who wants to be president.

And then there's all that money he receives each year from Bain Capital (even though he is supposedly retired from that company). The federal government is investigating Bain because the company has been declaring their income as a capital gain (so it will be taxed at the lower capital gains rate) rather than earned income, which it really is. Right-wingers will claim that this is not Willard's doing, but he is certainly benefitting from it. And this is not just old-fashioned tax evasion -- it is illegal tax fraud.

But that's not the only illegal tax fraud that Willard has been involved in. He has also committed tax fraud in the trust accounts he set up for his children and in the retirement account he set up for he and his wife. How did he do this? By vastly under-valuing the stock he put into those accounts. The children's trust is currently valued at over $100 million, but supposedly Willard put less than $1 million into it. That's an incredible return on that stock. Obviously it was worth much more than the $1 million he claimed it was worth -- and if that is true, he should have paid taxes on the value above $1 million. He committed illegal tax fraud.

The retirement account is much the same. There was a cap of only $30,000 a year that Willard could put into the account without paying taxes on the money. But somehow that $30,000 a year of stock he put in while working at Bain Capital has now grown to over $87 million. The stock was under-valued when he put it in -- and that is illegal tax fraud.

I honestly have trouble believing that millions of people in this country actually want this man to be our president. He is a compulsive liar, a tax evader, and a lawbreaker for committing tax fraud. He has no moral or ethical center, which is probably why he finds it easy to be on both sides of almost every issue. He would be a disaster if elected president.