Mitt Romney really doesn't want voters to know how many servants he has or how much he pays them

by Laura Clawson

Mitt Romney still doesn't want us to know how much household staff he has, or how much he pays them. To that end, he's outsourced his household help to a payroll company and is reporting payroll taxes quarterly, so none of it shows up on the 379 pages of 2011 tax returns he's released:

The Romney campaign said via email that the decision to file household help taxes separately was meant to make the Romneys' taxes easier to manage. "This method makes record-keeping easier," the spokesperson said.

But this simpler record keeping also shields Romney's household help arrangements from public scrutiny.

If it's tax-related and it shields Romney from scrutiny, the chances it was done coincidentally for other reasons are approaching nil.

Romney's 2010 tax returns showed he'd paid $20,603 in wages to four household employees, raising questions about just how many hours of what kind of work these four people were doing for which the Romneys were paying so little. Other questions that were raised included "Really? You have multiple large homes—mansions, even—in different states and you expect us to believe you don't have more staff?"

Romney's 2011 tax returns at least let us know the specifics of why we don't know what we don't know on this front: outsourcing to a payroll company and quarterly returns. But the big answer remains the same. Romney says he wants to represent us, to be our leader, to be in charge of job creation for the nation. But he doesn't want us to know how he handles job creation or pay in his own life.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/09/25/1136186/-Mitt-Romney-really-doesn-t-want-voters-to-know-how-many-servants-he-has-or-how-much-he-pays-them