Mitt Romney has always said that he left the private-equity firm Bain Capital in February, 1999, when he took charge of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. And he’s used this fact to inoculate himself against charges that he was responsible for bad things that happened at Bain-controlled companies after he supposedly left the firm. But as the Boston Globe reported yesterday, and as Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo reported earlier this month, there are myriad post-February, 1999, S.E.C. filings for various Bain-related entities which describe Romney as still working for Bain. Most strikingly, the Globe found S.E.C. filings that list Romney as Bain’s C.E.O. and the chairman of its board, as well as its sole stockholder. All of which seems to suggest that Romney was lying either to voters (because he was, in fact, actively involved with Bain after he took over the Olympics effort), or to the S.E.C., neither of which would be good.

The truth, though, seems to be less dramatic than that, and it is possible to square Romney’s account of his career at Bain with the S.E.C. filings. Romney has often described his initial departure from the firm—which happened very suddenly—as a “leave of absence,” and it wasn’t until 2002 that his formal ties with the firm were dissolved. (And even after 2002, he reaped the benefits of a sweetheart severance agreement that gave him stakes in Bain’s investment funds.) Given that, and given the fact that Romney was the sole stockholder in the firm, it’s plausible that he kept his titles at Bain even if he wasn’t actually doing anything there until it was clear that he wouldn’t be returning to it. In other words, he might well have been in charge on paper while having no real responsibility at the company. Indeed, Fortune reported yesterday—thanks, one wonders, to a leak from the Romney campaign?—that the offering documents Bain provided to potential investors in 2000 in its next private-equity fund did not list Romney as part of the fund’s management.

All this may mean that the Globe’s report doesn’t really show what Romney’s critics (and the Obama campaign) would like it to show: namely, that he was in fact of charge of Bain long after February, 1999. Yet the fact that it doesn’t quite show this doesn’t mean that it’s not politically damaging, because what this constant drip-drip of revelations about S.E.C. filings and tax returns and overfunded I.R.A.s underscores is how adept Mitt Romney has been at gaming the system, and how easy it’s been for him to play by rules that most Americans simply can’t play by.

What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars. (Henry Blodget suggests here that Romney’s ownership of Bain Capital shares may explain how that I.R.A. could have legally gotten so big.) And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.

Photograph by Joe Cavaretta/AP Photo.

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