As I pointed out last night, he hasn’t released his tax returns, so all I have to go on is this article from the Springfield Republican/MassLive. So it’s possible the reporter completely screwed up in reading the return. But if he got it right, Brown has some serious explaining to do.
The article says Brown and his wife reported $510,856 in income on their joint return. I pointed out last night why the employment and royalties portion of this number seems artificially low to me. But there’s something else: Brown reported on his 2011 personal financial disclosure that he and his immediate family had between $25,000 and $80,000 from three rental condos, two owned jointly by Sen. Brown and his wife, and the third owned by the two of them plus their daughter Ayla. Even if we assume Ayla received all of the income from the condo she co-owned, and that that was the most valuable one (I can’t tell from the documents, but I want to go out of my way to be fair to Brown), that’s $10,000 that Scott Brown and Gail Huff should have reported.
Now, there is a discrepancy of $3784 between the wage plus royalty income and the total income. So maybe that’s the rental income, after factoring in an insane amount of business expenses?
Doesn’t work. On his PFD, Brown reported between $1800 and $6500 of dividend income on his stock holdings. So that’s the $3784 difference (even if he reinvested, he still had to report those dividends to the IRS and pay tax on them).
Note that this does not include $4800-$14,000 in income from “excepted investment funds”, which as far as I can tell are a special category for financial disclosure purposes but still have a capital gains/dividends/interest tax obligation of some kind, depending on the nature of the fund. So if those should have been reported, he lied to the IRS even more.
So either the Springfield Republican misread Brown’s tax return, or he left between $10,000 and $80,000 off his tax return. If this is all a misunderstanding, Brown could clear it up by releasing his tax returns to the public. Silence should be interpreted as evidence of guilt.
and he threw his mother under the bus too.
And he called his grandmother’s a whore.
Here’s another aspect of the Scott Brown income tax saga:
It was reported that Brown deducted $1,401 for personal grooming, as a business expense, which is pretty dubious. As soon as this information was reported. Scott Brown immediately changed the subject by making his now infamous claims about Elizabeth Warren’s heritage. Brown clearly wanted to deflect attention away from his tax returns.
It’s time for Scott Brown to come clean and release his tax returns on a web-site.