WASHINGTON — As the GOP presidential candidate faced pressure over the past year to release more financial information, it was widely presumed that at some point he would buckle and follow a tradition started by his father, who released 12 years of tax returns. People who knew him, however, warned that there was no chance he’d release the returns.

They were right. Mitt Romney made it. But the journey has left him broken and battered.

For the first time in presidential politics, the words “Cayman Islands” and “Swiss Bank account” became campaign catch-phrases. President Barack Obama’s team produced a blistering ad featuring tropical locations and press clippings of stories about Romney’s aggressive tax avoidance. Did Romney receive amnesty under an IRS program for UBS tax cheats? Did he illegally manipulate foreign tax credits? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed to have been told by a source who invests with Bain Capital that Romney did not pay federal income taxes for a decade. Bain Capital executives told HuffPost that Romney never would have run for president if he’d thought he’d have to release his tax returns. As the pummeling continued, Haley Barbour, Michael Steele, Rick Perry, Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), and other prominent conservatives said Romney should just release some earlier tax returns and end the abuse.

“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” conservative columnist George Will said on ABC’s “This Week” in July. “Therefore, he must’ve calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

The public never learned what those higher costs may have been caused by. In the final days of the race, Romney’s pre-2010 tax returns are still nowhere to be seen. But while he escaped releasing them, the still-secret tax returns haunt Romney on the eve of the election. The Obama campaign, bucking the advice of the pundit class, bludgeoned Romney for his secrecy and for his offshore investments. Top Obama aide Stephanie Cutter even floated the possibility that Romney had committed a felony by giving false information on a previous disclosure (a charge that was deemed silly by reporters and dismissed by the Romney campaign, but which was based on the plain fact that his returns and his disclosure differed in meaningful ways).

The focus on Romney’s offshore investments and his missing tax returns — heightened by Reid’s incendiary charge — drove the former private equity executive into the ground, defining him at a crucial period before Romney had a chance to redefine himself after the primary.

“Romney’s refusal during his campaign to release his past tax returns betrayed a contempt for the electorate and for the democratic process, which relies on voters having the requisite information to make informed decisions,” said University of Southern California law professor Ed Kleinbard. “The reason for the tradition of releasing past tax returns — not returns prepared in the years an individual is running for the presidency — is to demonstrate that the candidate fully and fairly complied with the tax laws when the spotlight of the election was not already on him.”

What little tax information Romney actually released has critical implications for his campaign’s most fundamental argument: anti-business tax policy is crippling the economy, and Romney’s Bain experience makes him uniquely qualified to fix it. Romney’s taxes not only serve as a window into his own personal finances, they’re a record of his own active tax avoidance on behalf of others. Many of the offshore corporations on Romney’s 2010 tax return were not simply personal investment preferences –- they were shell companies established by Bain Capital.

“The thing that bothered me the most about his offshoring investments was not that he or his partners at Bain avoided paying taxes, but that they made it really easy for investors to cheat on their taxes,” said Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel for federal tax policy at Citizens for Tax Justice. “If you wanted to cheat, Bain Capital just made it really easy for you.”

Both Bain and Romney flirted with the edge of legality by using sham derivative transactions to mask investments in U.S. stocks, lowering their American tax burden. The IRS has been cracking down on this activity since 2010, a study indicating that the tax rate reductions Romney had been promising wealthy Americans simply are not mathematically possible without either raising taxes on the middle class or expanding the federal budget deficit. Romney responded not with a more narrowly tailored plan, but by insisting that other studies showed that his math did work. Most of those studies, however, were actually blog posts. And all of them indicated that Romney would have to eliminate a host of popular tax preferences, including the mortgage interest deduction, for people making as little as $100,000 a year –- an income level often considered to be middle-class.

In the closing days of the campaign, University of Texas law professor Calvin Johnson penned an op-ed for Tax Notes suggesting that Romney illegally undervalued his investments in order to dodge taxes on two enormous trust funds. Bloomberg detailed Romney’s use of a bogus charity to reduce his tax burden, a tactic which the IRS banned just months after Romney had set up his own, which he continues to profit from.

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