July 18, 2012 11:32 PM UTC

How Bad Are Romney's Tax Returns?

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• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez was a bad surrogate for himself. Romney’s campaign might want to find someone else to respond to stuff like this, as Fox 31’s  Eli Stokols reports:

Six years ago, Beauprez’s campaign demanded that his primary opponent, Marc Holzman, come clean with his own tax returns, even though Beauprez didn’t recall that when asked about it on Wednesday.

“We might have,” Beauprez said. “I don’t think I cared much about it because I knew we were going to win. But the campaign might have called for that.”

Indeed.

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Yesterday we pondered the question of how long Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney can continue to refuse to release tax returns beyond what little he has offered to this point. The obvious conclusion to make here is that there are things in those tax returns that are potentially very damaging to Romney — why else would he just stand there and take blow after blow when he could stop the questions whenever he wants?

As The Huffington Post reports today, maybe his tax returns really are that bad:

Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.

Bain executives say they’ve been instructed to keep company and Romney-specific information completely confidential, tightening the lockdown on an already closed company.

But pressure has been building on the presumptive GOP nominee. On Tuesday, the conservative National Review added its voice to a chorus of Republicans pushing him to disclose his returns from the years before 2010…

…A variety of possible explanations for Romney’s refusal to release the returns have flowed into the information vacuum. The Obama campaign has floated the notion that maybe he payed no taxes at all in some years. Others have wondered if he was part of the Swiss tax evasion scandal of 2009.

It seems clear that Romney isn’t going to be able to just refuse to release his returns and hope people stop asking for them. But maybe the alternative is just too risky for his campaign to ponder.

What say you, Polsters? What is in Romney’s tax returns that is so dangerous to his campaign?