Romney paid $3M in federal income tax in 2010

TAMPA, Fla. — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid about $3 million in federal income taxes in 2010, having earned more than seven times that from his investments. Those earnings, $21.7 million, put him among the wealthiest of American taxpayers. Romney's campaign said Tuesday he followed all tax laws.

At the same time, Romney gave nearly $3 million to charity — about half of that amount to the Mormon Church — which helped lower his effective tax rate to a modest 14 percent, according to records his campaign released early Tuesday.

Romney's income puts him in the top 0.006 percent of Americans, based on the most recent Internal Revenue Service data, from 2009. That year, only 8,274 filers reported income above $10 million.

His campaign advisers said the release of more than 500 pages of returns, schedules and worksheets was in "full compliance" with U.S. tax laws and was an effort to provide maximum transparency to the American public.

The documents were released as President Barack Obama prepared to deliver his State of the Union message, in which he is expected to talk about economic fairness. Asked during a round of television interviews Tuesday about Romney's relatively modest tax rate, given that he's a multimillionaire, White House adviser David Plouffe said: "We need to change our tax system. We need to change our tax code so that everybody is doing their fair share."

Romney had refused to disclose any federal tax returns, but then hinted he would only offer a single year's return in April. But mounting criticism from his rivals and a hard loss in last week's South Carolina primary forced his hand.

For 2011, Romney will pay about $3.2 million with an effective tax rate of about 15.4 percent, the campaign said. Those returns haven't yet been filed yet with the Internal Revenue Service. In total, he would pay more than $6.2 million in taxes on $45 million in income over the past two years, his campaign said.

"Gov. Romney has paid 100 percent of what he owes," said Benjamin Ginsberg, the Romney campaign's legal counsel. Ginsberg and other advisers insisted Romney did not use any aggressive tax strategies to help reduce or defer his tax income.

The advisers acknowledged that Romney continues to earn money from investments from Bain Capital, the Boston-based private equity firm the candidate founded and managed between 1984 and early 1999. Under an agreement with the firm when he left, Romney continued to earn "carried interest" on new Bain investments as a former partner in the firm even though he no longer ran the operation.