A while back, I blogged about the interesting pile of money Baron Hill seemed to come into according to his 2007 personal financial disclosure statement.

Recently, with all of the talk about millionaires in the campaign ads, I went back to look again at Baron’s financial disclosures and his tax returns. Credit where due; Baron has disclosed his tax returns for the time he has been in Congress (Sodrel has not, but that’s immaterial here).

I started out intending to nitpick one of the DCCC ads attacking Mike Sodrel and somehow ended up looking at personal finance reports and then tax returns for Baron Hill instead.

What’s interesting, though, is when you place Baron’s tax returns side-by-side with his personal financial disclosure statements for those same years.

They don’t match up.

That’s a big problem, because it means that one or the other would have to have been falsified by very definition for them not to match. Assuming that the personal financial disclosure statements were falsified (because I doubt that Baron would put the wrong information on his tax returns), that subjects him to all manner of penalties under the House ethics rules and various laws.

The forms themselves, signed by Baron Hill, note that a violation of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 results in a fine of more than $10,000 (likely) or even jail time (unlikely).

Anyway, onward to the issue at hand.

(Read more after the leap)

Baron’s tax returns are available for download from here on his campaign website. His personal financial disclosures are available for download here.

Baron reported interest income on his tax returns from an account with Home Federal Bank. In 1999, when Baron entered Congress, this interest income was all of $91. The amount varied a bit over time. But by 2004, when the voters of the 9th District sent Baron packing, it was earning $23 in interest.

But the next year, 2005, it rose to $944. In 2006, it ballooned to $3,812. Last year, it was $3,610. That’s an awful lot of money for interest on a savings account at any time, let alone times like these when interest rates on those sorts of accounts are nothing to write home about.

So Baron is getting a lot of money in interest or “ordinary dividends” from Home Federal Bank. Okay. That’s easy enough to establish.

But where is the money that is generating that income? The principle on which the interest is earned?

In 2007, Baron disclosed that he had somewhere between $100,001 and $250,000 in a bank account. At going interest rates for savings accounts, you’d need that kind of money in the bank (the higher end of that range, really) to generate interest income of around $3,500.

And, in 2007, Baron reported on his personal financial disclosures that he had that sort of money in the bank.

But remember what I said above? Baron had that sort of interest income for multiple years. He had even more interest income on his tax returns in 2006 than he had in 2007.

But nowhere, on his personal financial disclosure forms for 2006, do you find records of the asset or income source necessary to generate that sort of interest. Nothing shows up in Baron’s 2006 personal financial disclosure statements to generate that interest income. Nothing.

Baron presumably isn’t lying to the IRS, nor is his CPA. So where is the asset or income on his 2006 personal financial disclosure form? For that matter, where is the asset or income on his 2005 personal financial disclosure form that generated the almost a thousand dollars in interest income he had that year?

It is clear that there is a serious mismatch here that merits further investigation and examination. The tax forms that Baron filled out and signed don’t match the personal financial disclosure forms that he filled out and signed.

They must match up. The fact that they don’t means that Baron has lied somewhere. One of his forms has been falsified. I’m inclined to think it wasn’t his tax forms; a CPA filled those out for him and probably wouldn’t omit or misstate anything.

That leaves the personal financial disclosure forms, the falsification of which is a violation of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 and means that Baron Hill could be subject to a complaint before the House Ethics Committee.