The Bloomberg press has looked further at Romney's use of trusts and other arrangements to avoid taxes, using Freedom of INformation Act requests to obtain more information than was released by Romney in his meager tax return release. Romney established a charitable trust in 1996 of a type that Congress cracked down on in 1997 (regrettably, a crackdown that grandfathered existing arrangements, which is the way so many rich people get to keep using abusive shelters). See Jesse Drucker, Romney Avoids Taxeds via Loophole Cutting Mormon Donations, Bloomberg.com (Oct. 29, 2012).
So what did Romney do. He used a "charitable remainder unitrust" (CRUT) in a way that alllowed him to use the tax-exempt status of the Mormon Church (his primary charitable beneficiary) to defer taxes for more than 15 years. The trust benefits Romney considerably, by letting him benefit from the tax-free treatment that the charitable beneficiary has when they sell assets for a profit.and leaves the church less than current law requires for a trust. And it favors Romney over the church, because he gets a guaranteed payout from the trust (which converted most of its assets to cash in 2007) and the church only gets what's left at the end, if anything. Current trends suggest there won't be anything left for the charity at the end.
“The main benefit from a charitable remainder trust is the renting from your favorite charity of its exemption from taxation,” [Jonathan] Blattmachr [, a trusts and estates lawyer] said. Despite the name, giving a gift or getting a charitable deduction “is just a throwaway,” he said. “I used to structure them so the value dedicated to charity was as close to zero as possible without being zero.”
When individuals fund a charitable remainder unitrust, or “CRUT,” they defer capital gains taxes on any profit from the sale of the assets, and receive a small upfront charitable deduction and a stream of yearly cash payments. Like an individual retirement account, the trust allows money to grow tax deferred, while like an annuity it also pays Romney a steady income. After the funder’s death, the trust’s remaining assets go to a designated charity.
Romney’s CRUT, which is only a small part of the $250 million that Romney’s campaign cites as his net worth, has been paying him 8 percent of its assets each year. As the Romneys have received these payments, the money that will potentially be left for charity has declined from at least $750,000 in 2001 to $421,203 at the end of 2011. Id.
Under the 1997 change to the law, Congress required that the present value projected to be left for charity must equal at least 10% of the initial contribution. Romney's CRUT doesn't satisfy this requirement but was grandfathered in. The principal of the CRUT has dwindled to about half what it was. In the meantime, the Romney's have enjoyed considerable tax savings due to the way the CRUT works.
This information is revealing for two reasons. First, it demonstrates yet again that the Romney's are eager to use whatever mechanisms they can to reduce taxes, even though their millions are due in no small part to the way taxpayers make business possible (from courts to roads to police to the military to "rule of law" to relatively low funding costs for borrowing in the United States, etc.). One suspects that the reason Romney has stonewalled the public on his tax returns is that there is lots more of this nature shown therein, including possibly his participation in voluntary disclosure regarding offshore accounts (that otherwise might have resulted in criminal tax evasion charges).
Second, it shows that Congress recognized that CRUTs didn't make sense. So we have to ask why Congress didn't eliminate CRUTs altogether, rather than continuing to allow the gambit, and why, if it were going to continue to allow the gambit, it didn't terminate the favorable treatment of any existing CRUT that didn't satisfy the minimal funding requirement the new law included (10% of the original contribution has to go to charity before the donor can enjoy the immense benefit of the capital gains deferral thereby). Congress should allow the estate tax to lapse back to the pre-Bush levels, and it should then buttress the estate tax by legislating the end to the many different devices used by estate lawyers to get around the tax while still providing most of the benefits of the assets to the estate planners--CRUTs and similar estate-planning trusts are prime targets for action by Congress.
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