Convert fee-for-service reimbursements into bundled payments, and soon more severe diagnoses are given.
Mr. Fleischer was all over it, writing on his blog that "the Bain partners, in my opinion, misreported their income if they reported those converted fees as capital gains instead of ordinary income".
The tax strategy used by Bain and other firms to convert management fees — the compensation normally taxed as ordinary income — into capital gains is known as a "management fee waiver".
A couple of weeks ago in this column, I described how private equity firms like Bain Capital convert management fees, which would normally generate ordinary income, into investments that yield capital gain.
She read in Sunday's New York Times that Bain Capital partners had evaded income tax by converting management fees into fund investments.
Fleischer, a critic of the tax strategy, said a 2006 Romney financial disclosure shows more than $1 million in income from a Bain fund that has received converted management fees.
Reality Check: No Republican is going to vote for anything that back-doors taxation into thousands of avenues of government that they converted to fee-based systems over the decades.
The documents stated that Bain executives had the right to decide either annually or each quarter whether to waive some or all of their management fees; they also had the ability to convert the waived fees into investments in particular companies held by the funds.
But the young don't look out of those windows; they are fixated on screens the size of their palms, which open on to a Facebook page where, in a parody of what the movies once did, desire is converted "into a fee payment and a surrender to ads".
Put those trees into your IRA, however, and you convert both cutting fees and land appreciation into ordinary income taxed at 35% when you eventually withdraw it in retirement.
