Tom Tiffany's campaign for governor is built on one story. He ran a boat.

"Tom and his wife Chris owned and operated Wilderness Cruises in Wisconsin's beautiful Northwoods for 20 years, and he served as the dam tender on the Willow Flowage for 29 years," his campaign website says. "Yes, he was a dam man!" His television ads run with the slogan "Time to send in the dam man."

It's a good story. A small-business owner from up north, someone who met a payroll and knows what things cost. That's the pitch for why he should be trusted to run the state's finances.

On August 26, 2026, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published what the state's own tax records show about that business. Tiffany and his business went years without paying state income taxes.

What the Department of Revenue records show

Wisconsin's Department of Revenue tracks a line on every return called "net tax" — what you actually owe after your deductions and credits are applied. Here is Tiffany's:

• 2005: he paid $681 in personal state income taxes.
• 2006 through 2010: he had zero net state liability. He owed nothing, and he paid nothing. That's five years in a row.
• 2011, the year he was sworn into the state Assembly: $2,212.
• 2012 through 2018: between $1,680 and $2,445 a year.
• 2019: zero again.
• 2020 onward, after he was elected to Congress: between $4,613 and $8,432 a year.

That is six separate years — 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2019 — in which the man now asking to run Wisconsin's finances owed Wisconsin's treasury no personal income tax at all.

The businesses are a more complicated story, and the paper spells out why. Tiffany ran two of them, one after the other. Willow Inc. ran the boat on the Willow Flowage; it owed and paid the state no income taxes for more than a decade through 2016, then paid $65 in 2017, $308 in 2018 and $240 in 2019. Wisconsin River Cruises Inc., which took the operation to the Wisconsin River in Rhinelander in 2007, owed and paid no state income taxes at all between 2007 and 2013 — but it was an S corporation, and an S corporation's income and losses pass through to the owner's own return instead of being taxed at the corporate level. Willow Inc. was a C corporation, which does owe tax in its own right.

Sixty-five dollars. That is what the C corporation at the center of his campaign biography paid Wisconsin in income taxes in 2017.

What Tiffany says

Tiffany, 68, didn't dispute the records. He told the Journal Sentinel that the tour boat business had hard years, and he pointed at the economy.

"As any small business owner will tell you, it isn't always easy. During the times surrounding the financial crisis and recession, times were tough for all businesses, especially seasonal businesses like ours that relied on tourism."

He said the business averaged about 15 employees a year, and that before he and his wife took home a dollar there were employees, fuel, boat repairs and equipment to pay for. He said they paid property taxes, personal property taxes, unemployment insurance and payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare. And he said the zero year in 2019 came from depreciation on the boat and other equipment.

That is a real answer, and part of it checks out. Rachel Detert, an accounting professor at Marquette University and a certified public accountant, told the paper that a tax loss doesn't automatically mean a business was failing — taxable income is calculated under tax rules and can differ from what a business actually takes in. Depreciation lets a business write off the cost of equipment over time, and Wisconsin lets losses be carried forward against income for as many as the next 15 tax years.

But Detert was careful about how far that goes. Without the underlying corporate and individual returns, she said, she could only offer "viable explanations rather than definitive conclusions." Those returns are not public.

Scot Ross — a Democratic analyst who ran the liberal group One Wisconsin Now when it found Willow Inc. had no tax obligations going back to 2001 — put the blunt version on the table:

"Either Tiffany schemed to avoid paying his taxes or he was lying when he said he was a successful business owner."

Ross also noted that Tiffany's business had no state tax liability under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It wasn't one bad quarter.

The part that matters for the rest of us

Wisconsin runs on income tax. It pays for the schools, the roads, the university system, the plow that comes down your road in February, and the share of Medicaid the state has to cover. When one person owes nothing, someone else covers it. That is the whole arrangement.

And Tiffany is not running on a promise to leave taxes alone. In April 2026 he pledged to end Wisconsin's state income tax on tips and overtime if he's elected governor, telling a Wausau audience that "whether you're a food server, a bartender, waitress, nurse, construction worker, a machinist, you're going to see more money that's going to come back to you."

Set that beside the record. The nurse and the machinist paid their state income tax every one of those years. Tiffany, in six of them, did not.

This is the same shape as the rest of his campaign. He says he would end the subsidies Wisconsin hands data centers — while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. He introduces himself as a dairy-farm kid who understands working people, and he has cosponsored a national right-to-work bill in three different terms after voting for Act 10. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski says could cost "potentially 270,000 Wisconsinites" their health coverage. The words are always about the person working the shift. The record is always somewhere else.

What his opponent's records look like

The Journal Sentinel pulled the same records for the other candidate, and the comparison is not close.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, 40, the Democratic candidate for governor, owed and paid no state income taxes for exactly two years — 2006 and 2007, when he was 20 or 21 years old. Every year since, he has owed between $380 and nearly $8,000.

Tiffany is not the first Wisconsin candidate to face this. In 2010 the Wisconsin State Journal reported that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Terrence Wall, a millionaire real estate developer, hadn't paid personal state income taxes in nine of the previous 10 years. In 2021 the Journal Sentinel reported that Sarah Godlewski, then running in a Democratic Senate primary and now running for lieutenant governor, owed and paid no state income taxes in 2017 and 2018.

What's different here is the campaign built on top of it — the ads, the slogan, the biography.

The bottom line

Wisconsin Department of Revenue records show Tom Tiffany had zero net personal state income tax liability for 2006 through 2010 and again in 2019 — six years in which that line came to zero. Willow Inc., the C corporation that ran the boat on the Willow Flowage, owed nothing for more than a decade through 2016 and then paid $65; Wisconsin River Cruises, an S corporation whose income and losses pass through to his own return, owed nothing from 2007 through 2013. He is running for governor on that business record, and on a promise to cut the income tax for tipped and overtime workers who paid theirs every one of those years. The returns that would explain it are not public.

Source

Mary Spicuzza, "Tom Tiffany touts business success, but for years owed no taxes", Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 26, 2026. Photo: Hannah Schroeder / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.