Mitt Romney's campaign announced Friday that they will release the Republican nominee's 2011 tax returns this afternoon at 3 p.m., which will reveal the candidate paid a marginal rate of 14.1 percent.

Romney's blind trust trustee, R. Bradford Malt, said Romney artificially kept his marginal rate above 13 percent — the rate below which he says he has never paid — by not reporting nearly half his charitable giving.

The move seemed to contradict Romney's earlier position on the subject of tax payments.

“I don't pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don't think I'd be qualified to become president," he said in July.

An email to the Romney campaign account dedicated to responding to questions about tax returns, returns@mittromney.com, produced this response:

He has been clear that no American need pay more than he or she owes under the law. At the same time, he was in the unique position of having made a commitment to the public that his tax rate would be above 13%. In order to be consistent with that statement, the Romneys limited their deduction of charitable contributions.

Romney had released his 2010 tax return, and has been under pressure from Democrats to release many more years.

Romney's campaign obtained a letter from his tax preparer, PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP, to attest to his tax rate over the past two decades, which the campaign hopes will put an end to claims he never paid taxes for a decade.

According to the letter from the firm, Romney's average annual effective federal tax rate from 1990-2009 was 20.20 percent, with the lowest rate being 13.66 percent.

The letter also states that the Romneys gave to charity an average of 13.45 percent of their adjusted gross income over that period. In 2011 they donated nearly 30 percent of their income to charity.