(Bloomberg) Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his wife earned $205,271 in adjusted gross income in 2014 and paid $27,653 in taxes—an effective rate of about 13.5 percent, according to documents released Friday.
The Democratic presidential candidate, who has said Jane Sanders files the couple’s federal income taxes, provided paperwork listing $56,377 in 2014 deductions. They paid $24,509 in state and local income taxes and property taxes and $22,946 in home mortgage interest while making $8,350 in charitable contributions.
Sanders earlier had released the first two pages of his 2014 tax return last year but had provided no detail about the deductions.
Sanders’s taxes have become an issue in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. He has released information for the 2014 tax year only, far less than front-runner Hillary Clinton.
Jane Sanders told Bloomberg Television’s “With All Due Respect” on Monday that she does the couple’s taxes using tax-preparation software and that the 2015 version—“a pretty simple return”—would be released as soon as it’s ready. Monday is the annual deadline for filing individual income-tax returns in most of the U.S.
The couple’s return is “remarkable for just how unremarkable it is,” said Tony Nitti, a partner in the Aspen, Colorado, office of the accounting firm WithumSmith+Brown. The return may add to Sanders’s image as an “everyman” candidate, Nitti said. Given the lack of explosive detail, he added: “What was the problem? What was the delay in getting this thing out there?”
Sanders’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to questions about his taxes.
Most of the couple’s 2014 income was attributable to Sanders’s salary of $174,000 a year as a U.S. senator. They also reported $46,213 in Social Security benefits that year, $39,281 of which was taxable income, and $4,982 in taxable pension income that Sanders receives for having been mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The 2014 form also listed $4,900 in business income that Jane Sanders received as a member of a commission on the management of low-level radioactive waste disposal.
Trump’s Taxes
Among the 2016 major-party presidential candidates, Sanders’s lack of transparency regarding his taxes had been second only to Republican front-runner Donald Trump before Friday’s release. Trump has said he’s under an audit, and won’t release any returns until it’s over. The other Republican candidates—Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Governor John Kasich of Ohio—have posted several years’ worth of partial returns online.
Clinton has disclosed eight years of full returns, including detailed schedules, on her campaign website, and there are decades of returns for her and Bill Clinton available online. The Clintons’ 2014 return, which is the most recent her campaign has released, showed that the couple reported $27.9 million in adjusted gross income—about 136 times the amount reported by Sanders and his wife that year.
Tad Devine, a political adviser to Sanders, said the candidate would release returns from previous years “soon” after this year’s filing is finished by Jane Sanders. “Bernie is happy to be transparent,” Devine said in an interview on CNN.
In 2014, the senator and his wife reported $2 in income from ordinary dividends and $11 in taxable interest. Their $56,377 in deductions for the year is higher than average for their income level, according to a 2014 Congressional Research Service report, which found that in 2011, taxpayers reporting adjusted gross income from $200,000 to $250,000 claimed an average of $39,470 in itemized deductions.
—With assistance from Arit John and Jennifer Epstein
