John McCain: Mitt Romney Tax Returns Show He Paid Uncle Sam (VIDEO)

A Tax Expert Takes A Look At Romney's Tax Returns

Tax Notes has seen fit to put an informative article by Lee Sheppard about Mitt Romney’s tax returns outside its paywall. This piece shows that questions about what might lurk in the returns that Romney has withheld has diverted attention from some dodgy tax issues in the filings he has provided.

The public has gotten understandably unhappy about the $3 million Swiss bank account he held.

Sheppard points out that it was common for people like Romney not to report it at all, and the release of older returns would reveal whether he had complied before the US crackdown. Her comment:

Swiss bank account. Issue: Did Romney report it properly?
A Romney grantor trust had a $3 million Swiss bank account at UBS that the trustee closed in 2010. Romney’s campaign said that the account was disclosed on foreign bank account reports and that U.S. tax was paid on the interest from it…
Nondisclosure was common among rich people before the 2010 enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. The penalty for failure to file an FBAR was bupkes, and the agency in charge of enforcing the law, Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, had no interest in enforcing it. Very few FBARs were filed before 2010. At about 200,000 filings annually, the rate of FBAR compliance was estimated to be less than 20 percent before the IRS crackdown.

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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost