Hello. My name is Herb Shpilkes and I've been Mitt Romney's accountant since 1996. Over the years, Mitt and I have had a lot of laughs juggling fraudulent figures and getting away with it. That's right -- fraudulent.
Okay, so I'm a whistleblower, but when people find out about Mitt's tax returns, the shit's going to hit the fan and I don't want to be standing in front of it.
So, figuring I'll get immunity, I've been urging Mitt to reveal his returns. But Mitt is a principled guy so he always says the same thing:
Americans have a God-given right to make as much money as they can and then lie about it on their tax returns. Cheating on your taxes is as American as gazpacho. It creates jobs! It's what makes America the greatest broke country in the world! I'll bet Barack Obama reports everything on his tax returns. Hah! That's why he's not a real American.
Whatever.
In 2009, Mitt made $10,000,000, and I got him a tax refund of $11,000,000. What can I say? I know how to play the system because the system was invented by people like me for people like Mitt.
Not to pat myself on the back, but I can be very clever with tax deductions. I'll give you a few examples:
One time, I told Mitt to rent out two rooms in his mansion to tourists for a week so he could call his house a "bed & breakfast" and deduct all the upkeep for the whole house forever. He included a breakfast buffet that consisted of stale rolls and butter, and provided "live entertainment," which was really just the gardener whistling while he trimmed the hedges. Then, he renovated the entire house to "attract more guests." That cost him $875,000. That year, Mitt took a $2,000,000 loss on his "bed & breakfast" enterprise.
That worked so well, we did the same thing with his other houses.
Another time, Bain bought a cuckoo clock company in Dubuque, then fired everybody and shut it down. The powerful cuckoo clock makers union was livid, but Mitt didn't care. Mitt made $1,000,000 profit from that venture, so I had to create some serious deductions to offset that.
Here's what I did: I told Mitt to keep the 10,000 busted cuckoo clocks that were rotting away in the warehouse. Technically, Mitt owned the clocks anyway when he bought the company, and what the hell can you do with 10,000 broken cuckoo clocks? So I jiggled some figures around and decided that each clock was worth $35, which is not an unreasonable price for a working cuckoo clock. Then I told Mitt to donate all those cuckoo clocks to kids' charities.
That got him a nice $350,000 charitable deduction.
Like I said, these were lousy cuckoo clocks, but the kids' charities didn't know that and neither did the IRS. The cuckoo would pop out of the little door and fly across the room. I think one of them hit a kid in the eye and almost blinded him. His parents didn't have health care, so Mitt said, "You can see with one eye right?"
I love to take absurd depreciation deductions too. One day in 1998, I came up with a great idea. I decided to take depreciation deductions on Mitt, his kids and his wife. My rationalization was, "You're not getting any younger are you?"
Mitt got a $450,000 human depreciation deduction that year. Am I a genius or what?
Of course, there's a lot more financial hanky-panky -- the Cayman Islands money, the Swiss bank accounts -- but I won't bore you with the details. I spent a lot of time making it all too complicated for anyone to figure out. Also, let's face it, when the IRS gets a 10,000 page tax return covered with total gibberish, are they really going to look at it? Hell no. Because of all the tax cheats, the government can't afford enough IRS auditors.
I love America!
Anyway, aside from covering my ass, I decided to blow the whistle on Mitt because I'm a loyal American and I felt it was my patriotic duty. Also, the National Enquirer is paying me a million bucks.
I just have one question. Can a felon be elected President?
Editor's note: This post is satirical and is intended to be interpreted as such.