New York Times, Seeking Taxes, Romney Went After Business:

[T]he Romney administration relentlessly scoured the tax code for more loopholes, extracting hundreds of millions of corporate dollars to help close budget gaps in a state with a struggling economy. It was only after Mr. Romney was gearing up in 2005 for a possible White House bid that he backed away from some of his most assertive tax enforcement proposals amid intensifying complaints from local companies and conservative antitax groups in Washington.

Mr. Romney’s campaign against the tax loopholes, like no other period in his career, put him at odds with the values and expectations of the corporate world from which he came. Today, in seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Romney promotes himself as the pro-business candidate who understands what companies need and how to create jobs.

An examination of the period reveals a more complicated picture. It shows a governor who sometimes put the need to find new revenues ahead of the conservative argument that tax increases almost by definition kill jobs; a shrewd financial manager who aides said was guided by a strong sense of rectitude, not just pragmatism; and a political aspirant willing to buck the orthodoxies of his own party — at least, state lawmakers said, until his national ambitions tempered that impulse and led him to steer a more conservative course. 

Today Mr. Romney rarely, if ever, discusses on the campaign trail how he closed the Massachusetts tax loopholes. There is no proud description of them in his two books, even though many lawmakers in the state consider them a rare show of political courage. …

When he proposed the tax changes, Mr. Romney argued that they amounted to vigilant and fair enforcement of existing rules. Massachusetts business leaders said he was simply raising their taxes — a view that could complicate Mr. Romney’s bid for the presidency.