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April 30, 2010 06:49 PM UTC

Reporters should ask McInnis if he could avoid "beating" by releasing income without partners' info

  • 10 Comments
  • by: Jason Salzman

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

April 30th, 2010 It slipped by me somehow, but Wed. the Colorado Independent was the first news organization to ask Colorado gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis’ campaign what McInnis meant when he said on Fox Radio April 15 that he’d take a “beating” if he released his income tax returns.

McInnis, you recall, said on the radio: “So I’m not going to invite myself to my own beating.  I mean, let em [garbled words]. I’m going to give what I think the people want, not what The Denver Post wants.”

The Independent reported Wed. that McInnis spokesman Sean Duffy said that McInnis’ statement was a reference to the “beating” the Republican candidate would take from his business partners for releasing their personal income information, which would allegedly be included on McInnis’ income-tax forms.

The Independent quoted James Vander Laan, a certified public accountant, who stated that the individual partnership income of all partners is not listed on K-1 forms, which are used to report partnership income, just the individual’s total. But the individual’s percentage of all the partnership’s income categories is listed. So the total income of  the firm could be calculated from the information provided on an individual partner’s K-1 form.

Presented with this information by the Independent, Duffy emailed the Independent that this was the reason the forms were not released to the public.

But the Independent didn’t ask Vander Laan if McInnis could simply redact the information about the percentage of the partnership’s income that McInnis earned, thereby making it impossible to determine the total income of the firm from looking McInnis’ K-1 form.

“Absolutely,” Vander Laan said. “It would be pretty easy to take a black Marks-A-Lot and cover it up, wouldn’t it?”

Vander Laan added that McInnis could document his partnership income without releasing his K-1 form at all.

“Actually that information goes on a schedule in your 1040 that’s called Schedule E,” Vander Laan told me. “By the time it hits Schedule E, you can no longer see ownership percentage. That doesn’t appear on Schedule E.”

News outlets should follow up, asking McInnis if he would be willing to take these steps and possibly others, if required, to protect the privacy of his business partners and avoid a “beating” by them, if he releases his income tax returns.

See more about the “beating” coverate at Bigmedia.org, the Rocky Mountain Media Watch website

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10 thoughts on “Reporters should ask McInnis if he could avoid “beating” by releasing income without partners’ info”

  1. You gotta wonder why McInnis didn’t just suck it up and release his tax return like every other gubernatorial candidate in the U.S., knowing he would have a day or two of “lucrative lawyer-lobbying” clucking and then it would be over? Unless there’s more, of course, but could it be simple arrogant hubris?

    1. Like Dick Wadhams, Sean helps us Dems more than anyone in the Democratic party. three or four more self inflicted wounds like this and Bennet can spend October on the beach in Hawaii. (True story, one year Inouye spent the last 3 weeks of the campaign vacationing on the mainland.)

  2. No one wants to know or cares about how much his law firm earned. As Mr. Vander Laan pointed out that number or numbers related to it can easily be redacted.

    The question on everyone’s mind remains unanswered: “What is Mr. McInnis hiding?”  

  3. But there’s nothing in his original statement that indicates that he was worried about being beaten by his own partners. The cat is out of the bag and running laps around the neighborhood. It will be interesting to see if his campaign will feed this story some more or find a way to let it die.

  4. There is a publication called the AmLaw 100 which publishes information each year about the top one hundred law firms in the United States. Mr. McInnis’ firm is one of those on the list and one of the pieces of information included every year is the total income of the law firm. In other words, the information Mr. McInnis says he doesn’t want to release is released to the public every year by his law firm and he knows that. Therefore, there has to be another reason, yet unrevealed by Mr McInnis, as to why he won’t release his tax returns.

    The question remains unanswered: What is Mr. McInnis hiding from the voters?

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