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Secret Service Investigating Romney Tax Hack Claim
A federal investigation has been launched after hackers claimed to have stolen Mitt Romney’s tax returns. The hackers have given Romney until September 28th to pay $1 million in bitcoins or they say they will release the returns. From the article: "The claim was made in a post on the Pastebin site on Sunday that alleged that Romney's federal tax returns were taken from the offices of PriceWaterhouse Coopers in Frankin, Tenn., on August 25 by someone who snuck into the building and made copies of the document. The message author threatened to release the files publicly on September 28 and said copies of the files had been given to Democratic and Republican leaders in that county. Democrats have made Romney's refusal to release his tax returns a key point in their criticism that he is not in touch with working class voters."
The original release and on pastebin makes no mention of the money. Speculation at the moment is that someone took the original release and "added" a ransom and resubmitted it to pastebin.
Except there was no electronic vault. As the summary quite clearly states, someone broke/snuck into the building and made copies. I'm not even sure where the term "hacker" comes in here... maybe just because they want to be paid in bitcoins?
"Romney’s 1040 tax returns were taken from the PWC office 8/25/2012 by gaining access to the third floor via a gentleman working on the 3rd floor of the building. Once on the 3rd floor, the team moved down the stairs to the 2nd floor and setup shop in an empty office room. During the night, suite 260 was entered, and all available 1040 tax forms for Romney were copied. A package was sent to the PWC on suite 260 with a flash drive containing a copy of the 1040 files, plus copies were sent to the Democratic office in the county and copies were sent to the GOP office in the county at the beginning of the week also containing flash drives with copies of Romney’s tax returns before 2010. A scanned signature image for Mitt Romney from the 1040 forms were scanned and included with the packages, taken from earlier 1040 tax forms gathered and stored on the flash drives."
No, someone banks on them being really untraceable. I'm quite certain they plan to exchange them back to US$ fairly quickly. Meanwhile, bitcoins make a good storage.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ahm.. part of the point of bitcoins is they are hard (in theory at least) to track. There are no 'bit coin servers' the FBI can go to, just a distributed network of anonymous nodes. In theory asking for a ransom to be paid like this makes a lot of sense.. it doesn't have the traceability of government backed currency (or the banking system it travels through) nor does it have the physical delivery problem of something like gold. In practice, if they wanted to expend significant resources (the kind that only get expended if you piss off someone really powerful), they could probably compromise or surround enough nodes to maybe track the coins being spent and try to watch where they transition back into goods.... maybe.
In Mitt's case, there are 2 popular theories as to what he's hiding: 1) he was paying the Mormon church less tithing than he was supposed to be paying; 2) he was one of the tax cheats that applied for amnesty when the Swiss cooperated with the IRS. Hell, it could even be both.
For all his faults, George W. Bush even released 13 years of tax returns. He probably had lots of complex business arrangements, but nothing that you wouldn't expect of a typical high net worth individual. If you aren't doing something that would betray the trust of the American people, who are considering making you the most powerful person in the world, you won't be hiding anything.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Well bitcoins are like wire transfers...its all just meaningless account numbers, but.... the movement has to be consistent. So if I give you X bitcoins, I can see the account they go to when you spend them.... but its just another meaningless account number.
Where things get interesting is, that they mix.... so, if I see a transfer to another account, I can then trace any other transfers to or from that account, or other ones it is associated with.
If alice the crook uses her coins to buy a service from bob, then bob mixes her coins with others of his when he spends them, maybe from some tips he recieved from posting a tip bitcoin account on some web forum.... then he becomes easy to link.... and question. its "old fashioned police work" from there.
Of course, if they are careful, and only use those coins for relatively anonymous transactions which they can turn into cash or unassociated bitcoins.... that trail could go cold fast.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The thing about Bitcoins is you can "transact" them into something completely unattached to the original. So, $1M worth of crypto codes gets sent to the blackmailer, they immediately turn it into $1M worth of equally valid, but completely different crypto codes (probably using servers scattered around the world) and poof, the trail is dead. That's the good, bad, and ugly of Bitcoin in a nutshell.
How is he being taxed twice?
You pay tax on your income, you invest your income (principal) and pay tax on the investment's earnings. You don't pay tax again on the investment principal.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
That said Bain Capital's tax returns would be of far more interest than Romeny's personal returns.
Bain is an LLC, so the taxation is all pass-through to the partners. So there really aren't any tax filings by Bain as a company, other than the 1065, which is a pretty basic income statement. Not interesting at all.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I don't agree this post is insightful. Interesting, maybe, but being wrong is not insightful. You said:
1. If he does have the real document how will he prove it? I mean all Romney will need to say is Those are not my returns but a forgery made by some crazed radical liberal who is willing to lie and cheat to get his party to win. The main stream democrats will not use this information because it is not from legal means, If they do you can get the republican conspiracy theory linking the democrats to an event similar to Watergate.
The reason the scammers probably don't have any real tax return information is that none seems to have been leaked. Proving you have information can be done in many ways, such as releasing the exact amount of a certain deduction, or the SHA-1 hash of a whole electronic document. Proving they have the real thing is so easy, we can assume it's a scam if they didn't. Now, having Romney lie and deny it's genuine would quickly end his chances of winning the election. Reporters would come out of the woodwork to verify random facts from the returns. I could probably verify a few from home using Google. They lie would be almost instantly exposed.
2. Bit coins? Really? here is a guy who is publicly saying he committed a crime. FBI goes to the Bit Coin Servers with a warrant sends the million and tracks every Bit to see who finally receives it. Oh it goes to a PO Box... That is OK, you get an FBI agent waiting right next to that PO Box to arrest anyone who opens it.
Here you're simply ignorant of how bit coins work. There are no "servers", it's P2P. The other end receiving the bitcoins would likely be a Tor node in Russia, where our FBI couldn't even trace the packets. The FBI could watch as the bitcoins get traded through many transactions, but they couldn't even identify what nation those trades occur in, and certainly not who owns the various bitcoin destinations. That's why bitcoins are valuable. They enable criminals to launder money.
3. How politically damaging is the truth anyways? It seems like the only people who really care will not vote for Romney anyways. He already admits that he pays less percentage in tax then most Americans. After months of digging you may find that he missed the rule here and there. But then the other side will find that he could have benefited from other areas where it balanced out.
This issue is severely damaging his credibility and may cost him the election. The one thing we know about Romney is he is quite willing to change his behavior and even stated beliefs in order to maximize his likelihood of being elected. Therefore, the information in his returns is more damaging than Mitt's estimated fallout from not revealing them.
There is the argument If Romney doesn't have anything to hide then why isn't he releasing his taxes. This is on the same vane the only people who should opposed to airport searches are people with something to hide. Why would he not want to release taxes? Because his taxes are long and complex, it isn't like our W2 done on the simple form. His opponents will distract his discussion of what he considers important issue and bogged down defending every line item in his taxes that he probably paid a team of accountants to do for him.
Are you really comparing the need Americans have for trusting their future president to a guy who doesn't want to be groped at the airport? Romney's greatest argument for the presidency is his business background, yet he refuses to reveal what sort of business he's been doing. To continue with the airport analogy, before I'd let that guy trying to get on the plane take control of our country, I'd do a full body cavity search. I'd take blood samples and have them tested for drugs. I'd get a stool sample and check for parasites.
I personalty don't care for Romney and I don't think I will vote for him. But I am
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
For all the people complaining about making private things public:
1) At one time in the US, tax returns were public information. When the IRS was new, everyone's info was published to show that everyone paid their share. I'm not saying we need to force people back to this precedent, but just saying that there is a a precedent.
2) The precedent of Presidential Candidates releasing tax returns for 10 years was started by... George Romney, Willard M. Romney's dad. His reasoning was that any one year could be a fluke, but 10 years would show a pattern. Again, not saying they should have broken in and taken his taxes, but the precedent was set.
The people should be prosecuted. They've broken the law and should face consequences. But anyone rising up in anger against the unprecedented nature of this needs to look at precedents.
And then they pay taxes on the "Gains" not the part they previously earned. Nothing is taxed twice. We need to keep pointing that out because the GP was a complete moron.
because his money was taxed when it was initially earned
Not necessarily. Consider this set of examples from the New York Times
To see the value of this strategy, think about investing with pretax versus after-tax dollars. Suppose Jill works at an investment bank, and her employer pays her a year-end bonus of $500,000. The bonus is taxed at a combined state and federal rate of 50 percent, leaving her with $250,000 to invest. She invests that $250,000 in her friend Jack’s private equity fund, and the investment doubles in value over five years. The $250,000 of new gain is taxed at the 15 percent long-term capital gains rate, leaving her with $212,500 and an overall after-tax amount of $462,500.
Now consider Jack, who works at the private equity fund. To satisfy his co-investment obligation, Jack must invest in the fund. Under a fee waiver program, he waives $500,000 of his portion of the management fee and credits his capital account with that amount. After the $500,000 doubles over five years, and is then taxed on the full amount at capital gains rates on the back end, Jack walks away with $850,000 — roughly 84 percent better off than Jill, who invested with after-tax dollars.
Four years of ZIRP have not been kind to the accounting fiction known as the "trust fund".
Yes, that's why it's down to 20 years.
The trust fund ratio, which indicates the number of years of program cost that could be financed solely with current trust fund reserves, peaked in 2008, declined through 2011, and is expected to decline further in future years. After 2020, Treasury will redeem trust fund assets in amounts that exceed interest earnings until exhaustion of trust fund reserves in 2033, three years earlier than projected last year. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2086.
source
As for the "accounting fiction" the trust fund is invested solely in Treasury Bonds, those are the AAA rated investments backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Goverment. You can be an anarchist if you want, but the U.S. Government has never failed to pay back a dollar of treasury bond debt. They get shitty interest rates though (currently 10 year notes are returning a negative interest rate -- you get less back in 10 years than you invest up front, but they still sell easily).
From http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2012/07/30/why-i-dont-believe-that-anonymous-hacked-the-irs-for-romneys-returns/ :
(Author's note: Apparently, some folks are upset that I didn't explicitly state that this original story appeared on a satirical site - though I clearly linked to it in the piece. The point of my piece was to point out that it couldn't possibly be true - not to "debunk" a satire. It was meant to remind folks not to simply share without reading - also in the original story - and not to merely rely on a headline or a sentence in an email for your news. Those of you who stop by the blog regularly get that and I appreciate it. I'm not going to change the original piece but I am going to clarify this in big red letters at the top so that the rest of you can sleep a little better.)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's the core of this : the suspicion is that Romney was one of the many thousands who took advantage of the Treasury's 2009 amnesty for those illegally evading taxes through the use of off-shore banks.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Where are your messiah's income tax returns
12 years worth, for both Obama and Biden:
http://www.barackobama.com/tax-returns/
Your move.
With the first link, the chain is forged.