Lakhota
Diamond Member
By Stephanie Mencimer
In 2009, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman announced that the IRS had created a new task force to audit people he called "global high-wealth individuals." These new IRS targets, Shulman explained, have tens of millions of dollars in income and assets and "make use of sophisticated financial, business, and investment arrangements with complicated legal structures and tax consequences." They often have an intricate web of related business entities like S-corporations and other pass-through entities they control, along with various off-shore accounts and business entities. In other words, they're people like Mitt Romney.
There aren't that many people in the "global high-wealth individual" grouponly about 8,000 taxpayers a year who have more than $10 million in annual incomeand Romney is "exactly the kind of taxpayer the program was designed to look at," says Rebecca Wilkins, a lawyer at the Center for Tax Justice who used to work with rich clients as a CPA. It's possible for someone with a lot of income, like a corporate CEO, to have a fairly simple tax return, Wilkins says. But Romney's return from 2010 (the only completed one he's released so far) weighs in at 203 pages; 55 pages are simply devoted to disclosing the existence of a host of foreign transactions in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. In his domestic portfolio, there's Romneys IRA, to which he was legally able to contribute only around $30,000 a year but which is now mysteriously worth between $21 and $102 million. It's the sort of stuff that the new IRS unit is supposed to vet.
Romney's campaign has said he's never been audited.
More: The IRS Is Aggressively Auditing "Global High-Wealth Individuals"