When Did Romney Step Back From Bain? It's Complicated When Mitt Romney was running for governor of Massachusetts a decade ago, Democrats went before a state commission to demand that he be struck from the ballot. Their argument: After taking over the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he had ceased to live and work in Massachusetts, the state where he had built Bain Capital into one of the leading private equity firms in the world. Mr. Romney's team was just as insistent in arguing the opposite. For 30 years, his lawyer argued, "the center of his social, civic and business life has been in this commonwealth." Now, amid the heat of the presidential campaign and unrelenting attacks from Democrats over Mr. Romney's tenure at Bain, the three-year sojourn in Utah has again become the source of controversy - but with the positions reversed. President Obama and the Democrats are questioning whether Mr. Romney really left Bain in February 1999, when he took over the Olympics. And Mr. Romney and the Republicans are insisting that he ended his day-to-day management role at Bain after taking the Olympics job. At stake is whether Democrats can hold Mr. Romney responsible for a series of now-controversial investments Bain made during the period in question, including in companies that specialized in outsourcing, laid off some of their workers or declared bankruptcy. Mr. Romney faced a barrage of attacks over the issue on Sunday, as well as new demands, even from Republicans, that he release more tax returns. Democrats have seized on Mr. Romney's Bain ties as a test of his credibility, suggesting that he is evading responsibility for his leadership of Bain. The attacks have thrust Mr. Romney's three-year leave to the center of the presidential campaign, questioning a central component of Mr. Romney's case for election - that his business experience gives him the experience to steer the economy on the right course - while putting his campaign on the defensive when it could be attacking Mr. Obama's job record. On Sunday, Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to Mr. Romney, told CNN that the candidate had "retired retroactively" from Bain more than two years after leaving in 1999, an example of how the complexity of Mr. Romney's business has proved difficult to explain in the simple terms favored by political campaigns. The complications arise in part from the ways in which Bain was organized. When Bain Capital was originally created, Mr. Romney was given full control of the private equity firm's new management company, Bain Capital Inc. When Mr. Romney went on leave in 1999, he retained ownership of that entity - and with it, in theory at least, the power to control Bain Capital's funds. At the time, Mr. Romney appeared to be leaving open the possibility that he would return to Bain. His leave was originally characterized as part time, and he told The Boston Herald in 1999 that he would be providing input on investment and personnel decisions in his absence. Campaign and company officials now say that the Olympics job quickly became all-consuming and that Mr. Romney delegated his management powers to the active partners, most of them longtime friends and colleagues. And in recent years, Mr. Romney has been far more definitive in characterizing his departure. "Since Feb. 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way," reads a footnote to Mr. Romney's most recent federal financial disclosures. Yet because he retained technical control of Bain Capital's management and because his wealth remained heavily tied up with the firm, Mr. Romney's name or signature appears on dozens of documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission between February 1999 and August 2001, when he finalized a retirement deal with the active Bain partners and transferred to them his shares of Bain's management entity. "Mitt's name were on the documents as the chief executive and sole owner of the company," Edward W. Conard, a Bain partner at the time, said during an appearance on MSNBC on Sunday. And it took several years for us to sort out how to put the management team in place. Michael Luo and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.