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"someone alleged this so it must be true" scenario

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Romney says he didn’t file as Mass. resident in ’99-’00 ; Candidate amended returns after launching candidacy for governor

Republican gubernatorial hopeful Mitt Romney contradicted his previous public statements yesterday, and said for the first time that he did not file Massachusetts income tax returns for 1999 and 2000 as a resident of this state.

At a news conference, Romney said that he filed as a part-year resident for 1999 and a nonresident for 2000. He amended those returns, claiming Massachusetts resident status, on April 2, a week after he announced he was running for governor of Massachusetts and four days before the state Republican convention that endorsed his candidacy.

The Massachusetts Constitution requires a governor to be a resident for each of the seven years prior to the election. Romney has been embroiled in a controversy over his residency since Wednesday, when the Globe reported his home in Park City, Utah, was classified as his “primary residence” for 1999 through 2001, giving him a $54,000 break on his property taxes.

The Massachusetts Department of Revenue considers an individual a part-year resident if he leaves the state during the year, and has “terminated your residency in Massachusetts to establish a residence outside the state” but still has a source of income here. In 2000, he filed as a nonresident, defined as someone who is not a resident, but again has a source of income in the state. He received an extension for his 2001 return.

Romney’s revelations about his amended returns came one day after he told reporters he had “filed both as a resident of Utah and a resident of Massachusetts” when asked whether he filed taxes as a resident of Massachusetts from 1999 to 2001.

Earlier in the week, he rejected a request by the Globe for copies of his returns with financial information redacted, but his residential status visible. A Romney spokesman insisted at that time the GOP candidate had filed his returns as a Massachusetts resident, but told the Globe reporter, “You’re going to have to take my word for it.”

The issue could be politically damaging. Romney’s candidacy rides heavily on his public image as a clean-cut, honest businessman who brought integrity to the scandal-tarred Winter Olympics, and would do the same for Beacon Hill. However, his handling of the residency questions has been marked by shifting stories and incomplete answers that concealed key facts.

In addition to the revision of his statement on his Massachusetts tax status, Romney originally said he had not seen the property tax bills from Summit County, Utah, that showed he was receiving a deep discount because his primary residence was in Utah. He said the bills were addressed to his wife, Ann, and that she dealt with them. However, records show the bills were sent to him and that he paid the taxes in 1999 and 2000, while his wife paid the 2001 real estate tax.

Romney also said he did not learn he received the tax break given to those with primary residences in Utah until he read about it in the Globe on Wednesday. However, Summit County, Utah, tax assessors sent Romney a “notice of property valuation and tax changes” for each of the three years, spelling out that he was getting a primary resident tax cut on his $3.8 million home. The issue is a hotly debated one in the exclusive resort area, where wealthy Americans have second and third homes.

His status was also reported in an article in the Utah newspaper The Deseret News, in which he said he had established his Park City home as his “primary residence for tax purposes.” The article pointed out that he would not rule out a run for office in Utah, where the residency requirement for governor is five years before the election. Having a permanent residence in Deer Valley beginning in 1999 could qualify Romney for the 2004 gubernatorial election in Utah.

He faced attacks from his political opponents over his credibility yesterday.

“He lied yesterday and he has different story today,” said James Roosevelt, the Democratic Party’s general counsel. “He signed the returns under pains and penalties of perjury. I think he made his intentions quite clear at the time he signed those returns.”

Romney said he had decided to file the amendments to his returns when he returned to Massachusetts in late March and talked to his campaign lawyers about his qualifications for running for governor, including whether he met the residency requirement. He said when the issue of his tax returns was discussed, he realized he should have filed as a resident because his intent while he was in Utah was to return to Massachusetts, which he considers his permanent home.

“I am amending them because it is the right thing to do,” Romney said.

It’s not clear precisely what tax advantage he gained by claiming resident status in his amended return because he would not reveal its contents. And, according to DOR spokesman Tim Connolly, a taxpayer who files as a nonresident in Massachusetts only pays on income derived from sources in this state, while a resident pays taxes on income, no matter the source.

Romney said he had not given much thought to which residential status that his tax accountants at PriceWaterhouseCoopers checked off on his returns filed in Massachusetts. He said Utah law required him to file his return as a resident.

“I was not thinking of running for office,” Romney said. “I was trying to fill our my tax forms as accurately as possible.”

He said he was not aware of the seven-year residency rule to qualify as a candidate for governor until he returned in late March.

Romney’s campaign and the Summit County assessor’s office have blamed the classification of his home as a primary residence on a clerical error. Supervising appraiser Steve Martin said he assessed Romney’s home in April 1999, and suspects he mistakenly typed in a code that designated the land Romney’s home was built on as “primary,” while correctly coding the home as non-primary residence.

County Assessor Barbara Kresser said that her office was rushing to complete its valuation in May of that year, and that someone on her staff - she does not know who and said it could have been her - reconciled the inconsistency by assuming, since Romney was such a prominent figure as CEO of the Olympics, that he was a primary resident.

That assumption circumvented the normal procedure for granting of the 45 percent tax break to primary residents. That procedure calls for homeowners to submit proof of primary residency, such as driver’s license or voting records, and to file a document requesting the designation. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78211723

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It reminds me of George Washington's cherry tree chopping parable, only Mitt answers by handing his father a previously prepared legal document stating that he had not chopped down any cherry trees in the past three years.

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Utah, like most or all other states, had a two-tier state tax system in which Utah residents paid a lower state tax rate than nonresidents. The amount that [Romney] actually paid the State of Utah was the amount that he would have owed IF he had been a Utah state resident.

When Massachusetts Democrats claimed that Romney was not eligible to run for Governor because he had been a resident of Utah, however, Romney denied that, claiming he had been a resident of Massachusetts all along. He attempted to resolve the Utah state tax issue by paying Utah the difference between the taxes he would have owed Utah as a nonresident and the Utah resident amount he had actually paid Utah.

Utah accepted the payment and did not prosecute him. And, Massachusetts seemed to accept that because it allowed Romney to run for Governor, which, of course, he did. Meanwhile, there had been hearings on the matter--and I assume that Romney testified at those hearings under oath that he had been a Massachusetts resident all along.

So, did Romney commit tax fraud and/or perjury when he first signed his Utah state tax return and paid what a resident of Utah would owe? Or, did he commit perjury when he amended his Utah tax return and claimed he had NOT been a resident of Utah during the time in question?

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Asked by The Boston Globe when he was running for Governor of Massachusetts, about why he listed himself as a Utah resident, and not a Massachusetts resident, on his taxes, Mr. Romney told The Globe ten years ago that he would look into it. He would find out just exactly what was in his taxes and he would get back to them on it. Quoting from the The Globe, "...asked whether he received any advantages in Utah by filing as a full-time resident there in 1999 and 2000, Mr Romney said he was not sure but would respond to specific questions in writing". "If you want to say, 'was there any tax benefit anywhere,' you ought to help me understand exactly what that would mean, and I'd be happy to look at it," Romney said. "I will get precisely the answer that you'd like, but you have to tell me exactly what you want, and I'll make sure I get that for you." Still quoting from the The Globe here. But after a reporter submitted written questions to a campaign aide, Romney's spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said that Romney would not be responding because "he values his privacy and his wife's privacy."

What The Boston Globe was trying to get to there, ten years ago, was whether or not Mitt Romney was qualified to be the Governor of Massachusetts. Not in some abstract political sense, but literally qualified. Massachusetts has the oldest, functioning written constitution ... in the entire world. And dating back to the colonial era, the law in Massachusetts says that you have to be a continuous inhabitant of Massachusetts for the seven years immediately prior to your running for Governor, or you can not run for Governor.

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In 2002 when Mitt Romney moved back to Massachusetts from Utah to run for Governor in Massachusetts, that residency requirement was really a big problem for him. He maintained publicly until June of that year when he was running, that he had always paid taxes as a Massachusetts resident, so that residency requirement was going to be no problem.

Clearly he met the residency requirement, he'd been paying Massachusetts resident taxes. That's what he said all along, but that June, that year that he was running, June 2002, under pressure from the Democrats in the state and under scrutiny from the Boston press, that story fell apart because it turns out that he had not been paying taxes as a Massachusetts resident. Like he said he did. He had not been paying taxes as a Massachusetts resident, he had been paying taxes as a Utah resident.

Mr. Romney had said that wasn't the case, but he got caught. After he got caught, he admitted yeah, he'd been paying taxes as a Utah resident, BUT he was retroactively now, after the fact, now that he was running for Governor, now going back a few years that he was going to change that ... retroactively.

Mr. Romney had told a local newspaper reporter in Utah that he had declared Utah his primary residence for tax purposes. He had claimed a giant, permanent resident of Utah tax credit on his big Utah house out there. He saved $54,000 in taxes by doing that. He had signed multiple years of tax returns as a "part-time only" or "non-resident" of Massachusetts. But, all of that, he said ... How are you going to explain having done all that? He said it was all other people's mistakes.

Well, Mr. Romney said that must have been a mistake on the reporter's part. Mr. Romney told the Massachusetts State Ballot Commission "I've met with that reporter at least a hundred times over the last three years and I do not recall a specific conversation about my residence in Utah". [June 17, 2002 testimony before MA State Ballot Commission]

That reporter ultimately got a subpoena to appear in Massachusetts and testify as to whether or not Mr. Romney actually told her that, and the paper resisted that subpoena. In terms of the tax break that Mr. Romney got on his Utah house for being a full-time resident in Utah, he blamed a Clerk in the tax assessor's office in Utah, saying he had never asked for that tax break. Somebody just accidentally gave it to him and accidentally saved him $54,000. The County Assessor ended up taking the heat for it, although she also said at the time that such an error had never before occurred during her 12 years in office.

What about all those tax returns for those multiple years that Mr. Romney signed, saying that he wasn't a Massachusetts resident? What's his explanation for that one? His explanation was that he never bothered to read that stuff that he signed.

Mr. Romney ... said he had always trusted his accountants and simply signed and dated the returns. He said he did not notice that a line asking for his domicile was left blank on the Massachusetts returns. "I do not read those or review those before I sign them nor the attached schedules." As you're probably aware, your tax return is one of those things that you submit, you sign and submit, under the penalty of perjury.

This was something that was pointed out to Mr. Romney when he testified before the Massachusetts State Ballot Commission to try to be allowed to run for Governor. "...if I were to hand you an affidavit, Mr. Romney, and at the end of it, typed in your signature, and above your signature, I put "signed under the pains and penalties of perjury," and I said, "Mr. Romney, sign this document," you'd read it first; wouldn't you?" Romney: "If you were to put it in front of me, yes." [Lawyer] "So, you'd sign documents under the pains and penalties of perjury without necessarily reading them; is that your testimony?" Romney: "I have not read the entire Massachusetts tax form, nor the Federal tax form, nor the Utah tax form, and all of them have me sign under pains and penalty to the best of my knowledge and belief, and I do not read the entire form." [-June 18, 2002 testimony before MA State Ballot Commission]

When he finally got called out in June of that year, he admitted that a few months earlier when he decided to run for Governor, earlier that Spring, he had started the process of retroactively going back and changing those returns.

Earlier in the week, [Mr. Romney] rejected a request by the Globe for copies of his returns with financial information redacted, but his residential status visible. A Romney spokesman insisted at that time the GOP candidate had filed his returns as a Massachusetts resident, but told the Globe reporter, "You’re going to have to take my word for it. It's really important what's in those tax returns but I'm not going to show them to you. Trust me about what's in them." After the truth started coming out, Mr. Romney eventually said then to The Globe, just like he's saying to ABC now, that he would get them all the information that they wanted. "sure, sure, I'll get you what you need." But even though he said that to the reporter, face to face, he did not. He absolutely shut them down.

James Roosevelt, Jr. was the top lawyer for the Massachusetts Democratic Party when Mr. Romney's tax returns were part of their challenge about whether or not Mr. Romney was a Massachusetts resident or not. He states:

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Well, I think it fits with the pattern of trying to rewrite what his beliefs are, what his positions on issues are, and with trying to retroactively rewrite his personal history. And the interesting thing was that in the Ballot Law Commission hearing, we were trying to show what we believed to be true, that he had changed his residency to Utah. He was trying to show that he had maintained continuous ties with Massachusetts while he was in Utah working on the Olympics. And that's why he testified about his continuing business interests in Massachusetts, his continuing return to Massachusetts for board meetings that grew out of his employment at Bain.

He was trying to show that he had family and social ties back to Massachusetts, and really nobody was disputing that. The fact is that he had been very clearly stating one thing about his life. Then he started stating something else, and then he did these statements that he then tried to change latter. Oddly enough, it was always in a way that saved him taxes. Whether it was property taxes, or where he declared himself to have a principle residence in Utah and in Massachusetts, which got him a tax benefit in both places, or income taxes.

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If he'd actually done something wrong, don't you think that His Democratic opponent for Mass. governor would have pointed it out a decade ago?

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James Roosevelt, Jr. was the top lawyer for the Massachusetts Democratic Party when Mr. Romney's tax returns were part of their challenge about whether or not Mr. Romney was a Massachusetts resident or not

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This was something that was pointed out to Mr. Romney when he testified before the Massachusetts State Ballot Commission to try to be allowed to run for Governor.

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Romney was the Republican gubernatorial frontrunner that year when state elections officials investigated the fact that he received a major tax break on his $3.8 million mansion in Park City, Utah.

That June, the Boston Globe uncovered that Romney got a 45 percent discount on the mansion’s property taxes because the house was listed on local records as his “primary residence” from 1998 to 2000 while he oversaw the Winter Olympics. Had the house been a secondary residence, Romney would have had to pay the full rate.

The total break came to about $54,000, the newspaper reported. But more importantly, it implied Romney wasn’t a Massachusetts resident during those years. The state’s Constitution required candidates for governor to live in Massachusetts for seven years before the election.

Both Romney’s campaign and the tax assessor in Utah blamed a “clerical error” almost immediately and the candidate offered to pay the full rate. But it was enough for his critics to seize on.

Democrats quickly filed a complaint with state elections officials, which prompted an investigation. About two weeks after the story broke, Romney was called before the Massachusetts Ballot Law Commission to prove his residency.

He answered questions under oath for about four hours, most of it spent squaring off with a lawyer representing the Democrats. Romney said his primary residence was a house in Belmont, Mass., which his family had owned since 1971.

But according to a Globe story from the time, the hearing showed the Belmont house was kept in Romney’s wife’s name, he had obtained a Utah drivers license and even openly considered running for office in Utah.

At the end of the hearing, the commission ordered Romney to turn over pages from his 1999 and 2000 tax returns, reports show.

Days after the hearing, the bipartisan commission determined Romney met the qualifications to run for governor. Democrats declined to appeal and Romney went on to win the election. He remained governor until 2007.

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