Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan's Democratic Senate nominee, wants to "build a tax system that's fair for working people and makes billionaires pay their fair share." That's the campaign pitch. The financial disclosures tell a different story.

Accountants who reviewed El-Sayed's tax structure say he appears to have used the same S-corporation loophole that former Senator John Edwards made infamous — a maneuver specifically designed to dodge payroll taxes.

Here's how the trick works. Instead of paying yourself a normal salary — which gets hit with the full 15.3% in payroll taxes covering Social Security and Medicare — you set up an S-corp, pay yourself a minimal salary, and take the rest as corporate distributions. Distributions aren't subject to payroll tax. The IRS has flagged this exact structure as abusive when the salary component is unreasonably low, but enforcement is spotty and the savings are enormous.

John Edwards perfected this move back in the late 1990s. The former North Carolina senator and 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee routed approximately $26.9 million in trial lawyer income through his S-corp, avoiding an estimated $591,000 in Medicare taxes alone. When it came to light, it became one of the defining examples of Democratic tax hypocrisy — a man who built his political career on championing the little guy while engineering his finances to avoid the same taxes those little guys paid every two weeks without a choice.

Now El-Sayed appears to have pulled from the same playbook.

El-Sayed didn't set up this structure during some prior career chapter he could dismiss as ancient history. He's running right now on a platform that explicitly demands the wealthy hand over more to the federal government. His own website promises a tax system where the rich finally "pay their fair share." Meanwhile, his accountants apparently helped him find a way to pay less of his.

When your entire campaign message is that rich people use tricks to avoid taxes, and your own financial structure is one of the most well-known tax tricks in modern political history, the problem isn't legality. It's the canyon between what you say at the podium and what you do at the accountant's office.

Edwards, at least, had the decency to get caught after his political career was already in freefall for other reasons. El-Sayed is doing this on the way up — campaigning on tax fairness while his returns suggest he's been optimizing his own tax burden with the same tools he wants to take away from everyone else.