New York Times, Documents Show Details on Romney Family Trusts:

Hundreds of pages of confidential internal documents from the private equity firm Bain Capital published online Thursday provided new details on investments held by the Romney family’s trusts, as well as aggressive strategies that Bain appears to have used to minimize its investors’ and partners’ tax liabilities.

The documents include annual financial statements and investor letters circulated to limited partners in more than 20 Bain and related funds where Mitt Romney’s financial advisers have at times invested large parts of his personal fortune, estimated at more than $250 million.

The documents, obtained and published by Gawker.com, do not specify the
stakes held in the funds by the Romney family trusts or by other
investors. But they highlight the range and complexity of Mr. Romney’s
investments at a time when those very qualities have been the subject of
the Obama campaign’s main attacks against him, including demands that
Mr. Romney release his tax returns to clear up any suggestion that he
might be benefiting financially from legal loopholes or tax shelters.

Many documents disclose information that, while routinely provided to
Bain’s investors, is not typically disclosed to the public: the dollar
value of Bain investments in specific companies, fees charged by Bain
and other investment managers, and the value of different Bain funds in
some years….

Bain private equity funds in which the Romney family’s trusts are
invested appear to have used an aggressive tax approach, which some tax
lawyers believe is not legal, to save Bain partners more than $200
million in income taxes and more than $20 million in Midicare taxes.

Annual reports for four Bain Capital funds indicate that the funds
converted $1.05 billion in accumulated fees that otherwise would have
been ordinary income for Bain partners into capital gains, which are
taxed at a much lower rate.

Although some tax experts have criticized the approach, the Internal
Revenue Service is not known to have challenged any such arrangements.

In a blog post Thursday, Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the
University of Colorado, said that there was some disagreement among
lawyers, but that he believed: “If challenged in court, Bain would lose.
The Bain partners, in my opinion, misreported their income if they
reported these converted fees as capital gain instead of ordinary
income.”…

In an article that appeared in the journal Tax Notes in 2009, Gregg D.
Polsky, a tax law professor at the University of North Carolina School
of Law, called the tax strategy “extremely aggressive” and said it was
“subject to serious challenge by the IRS.”

• Bloomberg, Romney’s Bain Funds Showcase Deals for Wealthy Only
• Business Insider, We Got Excited About Gawker's Huge Dump Of Romney Investment Info… But Here's The Truth About What's There
  
• Daily Beast, Inside Mitt Romney’s Bain Files
• Forbes, Gawker's Worthless 'Bain Files'
• Forbes, Romney's Taxes: It's The Carried Interest, Stupid
• NPR, Gawker Releases 950 Pages of What It Says Are Internal Bain Documents
• Dan Shaviro (NYU), The Bain Document Drop
• Washington Post,
  Bain Documents Reveal Tax and Offshore Details