re: #27 kirkspencer

I’ve been thinking more about those tax returns and why he won’t release them. I’m wondering if he’s afraid of crowdsourcing.

There’s this assumption I’m seeing everywhere that his returns are going to be legal. After all they were accepted and he wasn’t audited, was he. Except, of course, that IRS audits have become less and less common for the wealthy. (two part punch on that. One, a requirement to audit across all brackets, and two the continuing cuts in number of experienced auditors.)

So what if some of his pre-2010 tax games were gray options, open to varying interpretations and challenges as to legality? Things like the guessed at method of getting his IRA so large: artificially pricing the stock low to purchase it for the account, then letting it revert to market. (If that’s what was done, by the way, it is borderline illegal - and might be completely depending on /how/ the artificial pricing was applied.)

What happens when a few thousand skilled and willing eyes start climbing through that backload of data?

Tax avoidance is legal, tax evasion is not. And I wonder if that’s part of what’s behind the unwillingness to release.

I don’t think anything illegal went on. I suspect there are some years he paid no taxes….or very little taxes using the loopholes and deductions that are available. But a very effective ad would be “why does the man who wants to be President get away with an effective tax rate of whatever ridiculously low number it is when a middle class family pays XX”. It’s the unfairness of the tax code he’s afraid of people finding out about.