WASHINGTON: Democrats in Congress released thousands of pages of former President Donald Trump\u2019s tax returns Friday, providing the most detailed picture to date of his finances over a six-year period, including his time in the White House, when he fought to keep the information private in a break with decades of precedent.
\nThe documents include individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, along with Trump\u2019s business entities from 2015-2020. They show how Trump used the tax code to lower his tax obligation and reveal details about foreign accounts, charitable contributions and the performance of some of his highest-profile business ventures, which had largely remained shielded from public scrutiny.
\nThe disclosure marks the culmination of a yearslong legal fight that has played out everywhere from the presidential campaign to Congress and the Supreme Court as Trump persistently rejected efforts to share details about his financial history \u2014 counter to the practice of transparency followed by all his predecessors in the post-Watergate era. The records release comes just days before Republicans retake control of the House and weeks after Trump began another campaign for the White House.
\nThe records show how Trump limited his tax liability by offsetting his income against corporate losses as well as millions of dollars in businesses expenses, asset depreciation and other deductions.
\nWhile Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015, the year he began his campaign for president, he paid just $750 in 2016 and 2017, according to a report released last week by Congress\u2019 nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. He paid nearly $1 million in 2018, but only $133,445 in 2019 and nothing in 2020, the year he unsuccessfully sought reelection.
\nThe records also detail Trump\u2019s foreign holdings.
\nTrump, according to the filings, reported having bank accounts in China, Ireland and the United Kingdom in 2015 through 2017, even as he was commander in chief. Starting in 2018, however, he only reported an account in the UK The returns also show that Trump claimed foreign tax credits for taxes he paid on various business ventures around the world, including licensing arrangements for use of his name on development projects and his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. In several years, Trump appears to have paid more in foreign taxes than he did in net US federal income taxes, with income reported in countries including Azerbaijan, China, India, Indonesia, Panama, the Philippines, St. Martin, Turkiye and the United Arab Emirates.
\nThe documents show that Trump\u2019s charitable donations fluctuated during his presidency but, in his final years, represented only a sliver of his income. In 2020, the year the coronavirus ravaged the economy, Trump reported no charitable donations at all. In 2019 and 2018 he reported writing checks for about $500,000 in donations. In earlier years the numbers were higher \u2014 $1.8 million in 2017 and $1.1 million in 2016.
\nIt\u2019s unclear whether the reported sums included Trump\u2019s $400,000 annual presidential salary, which he had said he would forgo and claimed he donated to various federal departments.
\nJeff Hoopes, an accounting professor at the University of North Carolina\u2019s Kenan-Flagler Business School, described Trump\u2019s taxes as a \u201clarge and complicated return, with a business that is set up to be complicated\u201d with \u201chundreds of entities scattered all over the globe.\u201d
\nHe noted that many of those entities are slightly unprofitable, which he described as \u201cpretty magical as far as the tax code.\u201d
\n\u201cIt\u2019s hard to know if someone\u2019s really bad at business or really good at tax planning, because they both look like the same thing,\u201d he said.
\nDaniel Shaviro, a taxation professor at New York University, cited the large financial losses from so many of Trump\u2019s businesses, despite their often healthy sales, as something that should raise suspicions from auditors.
\n\u201cIf he wasn\u2019t a political figure, but he was, say, a prominent businessman, you\u2019d really want to audit the heck out of him,\u201d Shaviro said. \u201cThere\u2019s fishy looking stuff here.\u201d
\nShaviro also cited examples of suspicious or sloppy math even in smaller businesses, such as an aviation firm dubbed \u201cDT Endeavor I LLC,\u201d which in 2020 reported both sales and expenses of $160,144. Such exact matches are unusual, Shaviro said. Yet the form also reported an $18,923 loss.
\n\u201cThe return doesn\u2019t say, \u2018Guess what? I\u2019m committing fraud,\u2019\u201d Shaviro said, \u201cbut there are red flags.\u201d
\nThe release marks the latest setback for Trump, who has been mired in investigations, including federal and state inquiries into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The Department of Justice also has been investigating reams of classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago club and possible efforts to obstruct the investigation.
\nIn a statement Friday, Trump lashed out at Democrats and the Supreme Court for the release.
\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to lead to horrible things for so many people,\u201d he said. \u201cThe radical, left Democrats have weaponized everything, but remember, that is a dangerous two-way street!\u201d
\nHe said the returns demonstrated \u201chow proudly successful I have been and how I have been able to use depreciation and various other tax deductions\u201d to build his businesses.
\nPresiding over a routine pro forma session of the House on Friday, Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said great care had been taken to ensure the returns were treated with sensitivity, with personal and other identifying information redacted.
\n\u201cWe\u2019ve been trying to be very careful to make sure that we weren\u2019t \u2018weaponizing\u2019 the IRS returns,\u201d said Beyer, D-Virginia He also is a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, which held a party-line vote last week to make the returns public.
\nThe returns detail how Trump used tax law to minimize his liability, including carrying forward massive losses from previous years, as allowed by tax law. Trump said during his 2016 campaign that paying little or no income tax in some years \u201cmakes me smart.\u201d
\nFor instance, in 2020, more than 150 of Trump\u2019s business entities listed negative qualified business income, which the IRS defines as \u201cthe net amount of qualified items of income, gain, deduction and loss from any qualified trade or business.\u201d In total for that tax year, combined with nearly $9 million in carryforward loss from previous years, Trump\u2019s qualified losses amounted to more than $58 million for the final year of his term in office.
\nAnother of Trump\u2019s money losers: the ice rink his company operated until last year in New York City\u2019s Central Park. Trump reported a total of $2.6 million in losses from Wollman Rink over the six years made public. The rink, an early Trump Organization jewel run through a contract with New York City\u2019s government, reported a loss of $1.3 million in 2015 despite taking in $9.3 million in revenue, according to the tax returns. The rink turned a $298,000 profit in 2016, but was back to melting cash in each of the next four years.
\nAspects of Trump\u2019s finances had been shrouded in mystery since his days as an up-and-coming Manhattan real estate developer in the 1980s.
\nTrump, known for building skyscrapers and hosting a reality TV show before winning the White House, did provide limited details about his holdings and income on mandatory disclosure forms and financial statements he provides to banks to secure loans and to financial magazines to justify his place on rankings of the world\u2019s billionaires.
\nTrump\u2019s longtime accounting firm has since disavowed the statements, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging Trump and his Trump Organization fraudulently inflated asset values on the statements. Trump and his company have denied wrongdoing.
\nIn October 2018, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series based on leaked tax records that contradicted the image Trump had tried to sell of himself as a self-made businessman. It showed that Trump received a modern-day equivalent of at least $413 million from his father\u2019s real estate holdings, with much of that money coming from what the Times called \u201ctax dodges\u201d in the 1990s.
\nA second series in 2020 showed that Trump paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years because he generally lost more money than he made.
\nIn its report last week, the Ways and Means Committee indicated the Trump administration may have disregarded a requirement mandating audits of a president\u2019s tax filings.
\nThe IRS only began to audit Trump\u2019s 2016 tax filings on April 3, 2019 \u2014 more than two years into his presidency \u2014 when the Ways and Means chairman, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., asked the agency for information related to the tax returns.
\nEvery president and major-party candidate since Richard Nixon has voluntarily made at least summaries of their tax information available to the public. Trump bucked that trend as a candidate and as president, repeatedly asserting that his taxes were \u201cunder audit\u201d and couldn\u2019t be released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: Democrats in Congress released thousands of pages of former President Donald Trump\u2019s tax returns Friday, providing the most detailed picture to date of his finances over a six-year period, including his time in the White House, when he fought to keep the information private in a break with decades of precedent. The documents include […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304647,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-304640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n