Elizabeth Warren and Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown will release their tax returns either this week or next, spokespeople from their campaigns said.
The senatorial candidates have been engaged in debates as to when they should release the information and how many years’ worth they should make available to the public.
Brown plans to release six years’ worth of taxes on Friday, according to a campaign press release, while Warren plans to release her taxes – four years’ worth – Wednesday, said campaign spokeswoman Alethea Harney.
In a letter to Warren written Tuesday, Jim Barnett, Brown’s campaign manager, called Warren’s plans “political gamesmanship” and challenged her professed dedication to “openness and transparency in government.”
Instead of satisfying The Boston Globe’s request for the candidate’s tax returns from the past six years, he wrote, “you have offered to release far more limited information and even have made that contingent on a demand that Sen. Brown go first.”
But Warren’s campaign contends that the Harvard Law School professor is as dedicated to transparency as Brown is.
“Elizabeth Warren has been clear from the beginning that she would voluntarily release her tax returns,” Harney said in an email interview.
Harney said Warren wants to be open with voters when it comes to her income.
“Elizabeth is not a career politician like Sen. Brown, but she will release her tax returns for her entire time in public service, and by releasing four years of returns, she is providing the people of Massachusetts with a transparent and full accounting of her financial situation,” she said.
Releasing the tax returns on Friday, as Brown plans to do, is exemplary of “a typical Washington game of releasing bad news when there is traditionally little news coverage,” Harney said, noting that Warren would rather “be more straightforward and make both returns available [Wednesday].”
In his letter to Warren, however, Barnett said Warren has been anything but transparent.
“The tax years you are attempting to conceal contain important and potentially revealing information, including income you received for outside legal work,” he wrote.
He mentioned the consulting work Warren did for Travelers Insurance in “a case against victims of asbestos poisoning” as an example of that outside work, for which she earned “at least $212,000, according to your personal financial disclosures,” he said.
Over a two-year period between 2010 and 2011, Warren made more than $700,000 in teaching and consulting fees and earned a total of about $358,022 combined from two federal government appointments, on top of an annual salary of about $350,000 from Harvard, according to financial reports she released in January.
Brown’s campaign has focused on the discrepancy between Warren’s actual earnings and her middle class-centric campaign.
But Warren “came up the hard way . . . out of a hard-working middle-class family,” she said on her website, which notes that she “has made her life’s work fighting for middle-class families.”
However, Warren’s earnings should not be politically compromising, said Boston University political science professor Christine Rossell in a phone interview.
“There’s nothing wrong with outside consulting,” she said, adding that many university professors work as consultants in their fields.
While the political candidates should release their taxes to the public, Rossell said, the information probably will not have a huge impact on the race for the Senate seat.
But the act of releasing the taxes is important, she noted.
“It’s just a custom we have in this country to release your taxes,” she said. “Otherwise, people think you have something to hide.”
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