The Clinton Tax Returns: What Will They Reveal?

An ABC News Review Has Found the Clintons Have Made More Than $50 Million Since Leaving the White House

By BRIAN ROSS and AVNI PATEL
April 3, 2008

Hillary Clinton has been pulling out all the stops to win the Democratic nomination for president -- but one: she still has not released her family's tax returns.

The tax returns will answer questions on how they made their millions.

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The campaign says they will release the documents sometime before April 15. Without them, many questions remain about how the Clintons made tens of millions of dollars -- and whether they used arcane tax loopholes available to the super-rich, an expert says. A Clinton campaign spokesman says the couple has paid all U.S. taxes at ordinary income tax rates.

An independent review by ABC News has found that since leaving the White House seven years ago, the senator and her former president husband have made well over $50 million, muchof it from paid speeches made by Bill Clinton.

A review of Sen. Clinton's annual ethics filings found that her husband has earned $47 million in fees from more than 280 speeches he has made around the world.

Clinton's biggest patrons include New York-based investment firm Goldman Sachs, which paid him $650,000 for four speeches in recent years, and two foreign firms. Gold Services International, a Colombian-based event organizer, brought Clinton to Latin America in 2005 for four days of speeches, earning Clinton $800,000. Another company, Toronto-based Power Within, paid Clinton $650,000 for a series of motivational speeches in Canada in 2005.

Aides to the former president have said that his paid speeches are an efficient way for him to make money and devote more of his time to charitable work.

The annual disclosures do not require Sen. Clinton to fully report her husband's income, which obscures the picture of how much the former president has made in his business dealings with longtime friends and fundraisers.

Read Sen. Clinton's latest disclosure form.

For example, an examination of the records reveals her husband is a partner in an investment fund, Yucaipa Global Partnership, registered in the Cayman Islands, and was paid "guaranteed payments to partner." Sen. Clinton's forms do not list the exact amount of her husband's payments, only that they totaled more than $1,000 over four years.

"No average person has interest and funds in the Cayman Islands. This is all the above-average, non-tax-paying, super rich," said Jack Blum, an attorney and leading expert on offshore tax havens