WASHINGTON: Thousands of pages of former President Donald Trump's tax returns were made public by Democrats in Congress on Friday, giving the most complete picture yet of his financial standing over a six-year period, including his tenure when he ran for office. Was. Breaking with decades of tradition, keep information secret.
Trump's business entities are listed in the documents along with his and his wife Melania's personal tax returns from 2015 to 2020.
They uncover information about foreign accounts, charitable donations, and the performance of some of Trump's most famous business ventures, which had been largely hidden from public scrutiny. They also demonstrate how Trump manipulated the tax code to reduce his tax liability.
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The revelations are the result of a protracted legal battle that has dragged on for years, from the presidential campaign to Congress and the Supreme Court, as Trump continually resists requests for information about his financial background, which have been denied by all of his predecessors. It was against the transparent policy adopted. The post-Watergate era. The records are made public just days before Republicans take back control of the House and weeks after Trump launches a new presidential campaign.
According to the records, Trump set off his income against corporate losses and deducted millions of dollars in business expenses, asset depreciation and other expenses to reduce his tax liability.
Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015, the year he launched his presidential campaign, but only $750 in 2016 and 2017, according to a study released last week by the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, which examines non- is biased.
In 2018, he contributed nearly $1 million, but in 2019 and 2020—the years he failed to seek re-election—he only contributed $133,445 and nothing else. Trump's foreign holdings are also mentioned in the records.
Even though he was commander in chief from 2015 to 2017, according to the filing, Trump claimed to have bank accounts in China, Ireland and the United Kingdom. But they only reported one account in the UK starting in 2018.
The tax returns also show that Trump sought foreign tax credits for taxes paid on several international business ventures, including the licensing of his name for use in construction projects and his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland.
With income reported in countries such as Azerbaijan, China, India, Indonesia, Panama, the Philippines, St. Martin, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, Trump has paid more in foreign taxes than in net US federal income taxes. many years.
Records show that contributions to charity fluctuated while Trump was president, but in his final years, they made up a tiny fraction of his total income.
Trump reported making no charitable contributions in 2020, the year the coronavirus ravaged the economy. He reported writing checks for donations totaling nearly $500,000 in both 2019 and 2018. The figures were higher in previous years ($1.8 million in 2017 and $1.1 million in 2016),
Uncertainty surrounds whether Trump's reported sum includes his $400,000 annual presidential salary, which he has pledged to forgo and claims he donated to multiple federal agencies.
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Jeff Hoopes, professor of accounting at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, said Trump's taxes were "large and complex" and that his company was "set up to be complex", with "hundreds of entities scattered all over the world". world." Many of those entities, he pointed out, are marginally unprofitable, which he called "pretty magical as a tax code."
"It's hard to tell if someone is really good at tax planning or really bad at business because they both look so similar," he said. Daniel Shaviro, professor of taxation at New York University, pointed out that auditors should often be wary of large losses for Trump's businesses despite strong sales.
You'd really want to audit the hell out of him if he wasn't a political figure, but rather a well-known businessman," Shaviro said. There's questionable-looking material here.
Shaviro also cited examples of questionable or careless math in smaller companies, such as aviation company DT Endeavor I LLC, which reported $160,144 in revenue and expenses in 2020. According to Shaviro, such exact matches are unusual. However, the form also indicated a loss of $18,923.
"Guess what? Doesn't appear on the return. I've been deceiving people," Shaviro declared, "but there are warning signs."
The publication represents the latest setback for Trump, who has been dogged by inquiries, including national and local ones into his attempts to rig the 2020 election.
The Department of Justice is also looking into potential obstruction of justice attempts after reams of classified documents were discovered at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Trump attacked Democrats and the Supreme Court for the release in a statement on Friday. For so many people, it will result in terrible things, he warned. Everything has been weaponized by the extreme left-wing Democrats, but keep in mind that this is a dangerous two-way street!
He claimed that by using depreciation and other tax deductions to expand his businesses, the returns showed "how proudly successful I have been."
Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, presided over a routine pro forma session of the House on Friday and stated that great care had been taken to ensure the returns were treated with sensitivity and had personal and other identifying information redacted.
Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, said, "We've been trying to be very careful to make sure that we weren't 'weaponizing' the IRS returns." He also sits on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, which last week voted along party lines to release the returns.
The tax returns show how Trump used the law to reduce his tax burden, including carrying forward sizable losses from earlier years as permitted by the tax code. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump claimed that paying little to no income tax in some years "makes me smart."
The IRS defines qualified business income as "the net amount of qualified items of income, gain, deduction and loss from any qualified trade or business," and in 2020, more than 150 of Trump's business entities reported negative qualified business income.
Trump's qualified losses for that tax year totaled more than $58 million, including almost $9 million in carryforward losses from prior years, for the year he left office.
The ice rink that Trump's business ran in Central Park until last year is yet another money loser for him. Over the course of the six years that were made public, Trump reported losses from Wollman Rink totaling $2.6 million.
The rink, an early crown jewel of the Trump Organization run under a contract with the city of New York, reported a loss of $1.3 million in 2015 despite bringing in $9.3 million in income, per the tax returns. Although the rink made $298,000 in profit in 2016, it lost money in each of the following four years.
Since his early years as a promising Manhattan real estate developer in the 1980s, certain aspects of Trump's finances have been shrouded in mystery.
Before being elected president, Trump, who is known for building skyscrapers and hosting a reality TV show, did disclose a limited amount of information about his assets and income on the required disclosure forms and financial statements he gives to banks to obtain loans and to financial publications to support his inclusion on lists of the world's billionaires.
The statements have since been denied by Trump's longtime accounting firm, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging that Trump and his Trump Organization falsely inflated the asset values on the statements. Both Trump and his business have denied any wrongdoing.
According to leaked tax records, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in October 2018 that refuted Trump's claim to be a self-made entrepreneur.
It revealed that Trump benefited from his father's real estate holdings to the tune of at least $413 million in today's money, a large portion of which came from what the New York Times referred to as "tax avoidance" in the 1990s.
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Trump didn't pay any income taxes in 10 of the prior 15 years, according to a second series published in 2020, because he typically lost more money than he earned.
The Ways and Means Committee suggested in its report from last week that the Trump administration might have ignored a rule requiring audits of a president's tax returns.
More than two years into Trump's presidency, the IRS didn't start looking into his 2016 tax returns until April 3, 2019, when Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts requested information about the returns.
Since Richard Nixon, every president and major-party candidate has voluntarily made at least brief summaries of their tax returns available to the public. With his repeated claims that his taxes were "under audit" and couldn't be released, Trump defied this trend both as a candidate and as president.