I have no doubt his non-profits have cheated and as such that could lead to illegalities on his tax returns. The guy shouldn’t be allowed to be connected to any charity or non-profit.
Keep in mind as well, if he had an accountant that tried to do everything by the book, he’d probably fire the guy and get someone better at massaging numbers.
I assure you, there are plenty of corrupt accountants. The ethics portion of the CPA exam is literally an open book test.
If the tax returns lie and try to conceal things, that needs to be found out. But even if his tax return itself is 100% correct and legal, it is almost guaranteed to point to where the money flows to and from, which I believe will reveal actual illegal financing such as money laundering, influence peddling etc.
My understanding of the Manafort case is that the accountants involved did everything by the book but weren’t told about all the stuff off the books. They’re not on trial… Manafort is. He was paying for tons of stuff with wire transfers from overseas so the shady stuff wasn’t showing up on his taxes.
I wouldn’t really expect it to be any different with Trump. Would you?
Well, a tax return is only as good as the material used to prepare it.
Trump uses his charitable foundation to make payments to business associates. Of course he cheats on his taxes.
Most likely figured she’d never be caught. She has immunity by the way.
An accountant for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort admitted at Manafort’s tax- and bank-fraud trial Friday that she filed tax returns she thought contained false information and that she may have committed a crime in doing so.
The IRS has very limited capabilities of automatically matching asset sales with what is reported on their tax returns. AFAIK if you sell your house or rental for $500K, you can say it was only $400K and they have no clue (the county registrar doesn’t report the info to IRS). In the case of the Trump organization there are 500 separate entity, generally LLCs, and typically a management company owns 1% of the economic interest and another LLC has 99% interest. But the management company has fully control over the property (golf course, winery, etc.) and maybe entitled to 20% of the profits. The specific property LLC is in turn owned by multiple other LLC e.g. Trump Golf international, and Trump Golf International property management. Which in turn are owned by an even larger LLCs.
Evidently part of the reason for the structure is to protect the organization from creditors. money is loaned to the management company, so if the property goes bankrupt the creditors only end up with 1%. I imagine the other reason for the absurdly complicated structure is to make it harder for the IRS to untangle.
Given Trump’s huge ego, it is entirely likely that he stupidly put out a press release. "Record sales of a condo at Mar Lago of $20 million. When you actually look at how the transaction is recorded it may only be $18 million. However, when you trace the amount reported by the various LLC the sum of all the parts might only $12 million. The IRS doesn’t have the resource to check everything, obviously given the number of audits, the Trump organization has gotten a lot of scrutiny. But generally, if you agree to pay back taxes and penalties the IRS won’t press criminal charges.
I’m not sure even Mueller team has enough resources to go through everything. If we actually do get our hands on Trump’s tax returns, I hope some smart techie figures out away of making this crowd sourced project. Check all the transaction related to the Trump’s Golf Course in New Jersey in the years 2001-2005 with the county records. I’d happily spend a few hours a week double checking things.
Would it surprise you if I told you the IRS knows how much your mortgage payment is and how much you still owe on your mortgage? Cause I have seen that info while researching income. I don’t know where it originates from though.
One reason I think Trumps tax return is probably clean, although I grant it’s release would lead to other entities, is that I imagine most of his income is hidden in various partnerships, corporations and that those are where the real cheating takes place, assuming there is cheating of course.
The thing on his tax returns Trump doesn’t want known may not be his income but rather his debt - both because it’s probably massive (Trump truly can’t imagine any fate worse than being outed as a non-billionaire) and because it’s probably owed to questionable entities that would raise immediate red flags about who has leverage on him.
An article on the subject here.
Edit: Though this article here. reminds me of a revelation from earlier this year that’s gotten buried beneath the chaos: starting in 2006 Trump switched from buying properties with debt to buying properties with cash. Why the sudden switch, and where did the cash come from?
Not at all, banks issue a 1099 form on mortgage interest, and also interest paid on saving accounts. Banks are federally regulated, computerize and its relatively easy for the Feds to make them do what the IRS wants.
Information about stock trades wasn’t reported to the IRS prior to 2011. Real estate transactions are recorded at the county level, and plenty of places in the country still do a lot of transaction on paper. They can be verified manually but not by simple computer matching. My property management company in Vegas reports my rental income to the IRS, but if I didn’t have one, I could report any amount of rent I wanted. If the rent went first to an LLC, it wouldn’t be easy for the IRS to trace, just by looking a checks deposited into my accounts.
You are correct that most of the cheating probably takes at subsidiary levels. But ultimately the Trump organization is a giant partnership. Trump tax returns includes a bunch of K-1 (partnership forms) so his income is function of the total income of the whole organization time his percentage ownership and so are deductions. We can also infer so information about the debt, if Trump has a 20% interest in LLC that takes a 200 million in interest if it’s at 5% than that’s $4 billion in debt if it is at 10% $2 billion. It would take additional digging to find the interest rate.
I have no idea what the law is regarding partnership and tax cheating. If Trump had the controlling interest in an LLC that was involved in tax cheating, at what point would Trump be criminally liable?
Then why is he so loath to let it become public knowledge?
Probably because it wouldn’t flatter him. Isn’t that how he looks at everything. Maybe he isn’t worth as much as he claims, or he doesn’t donate anything to anybody or some other weird thing.
President Trump might say he’s exactly what Wall Street needed to get off its ass and be the best ever.
From the article:
“The three Ts, Trump, tariffs and trade, are sort of a wet blanket on the embers of growth, but … the market can still go higher,” said Greg Luken, CEO of Luken Investment Analytics. “Bull markets don’t die of old age; they die of euphoria and we’re nowhere near euphoria.”
Imagine what this economy would be like if we had a real president.
Someday people will realize that the stock market isn’t actually the economy.
Not… likely.
Kai Rysdal’s been saying that on Marketplace for years. That’s on NPR, though, preaching to the choir.