Trump’s tax returns released Friday: Live updates
Democrats in Congress released thousands of pages Former President Donald Trump Friday’s tax return provides the most detailed picture yet of his finances over six years, including the time he spent in the White House fighting to keep information private, breaking decades of precedent. Offers.
Documents contain individual returns from Trump and his wife, Melania, with Trump’s entities from 2015 to 2020. They show how Trump has used tax law to reduce his tax liability, including foreign accounts, charitable donations, and his most high-profile businesses that remained largely hidden from public scrutiny. revealed details about its performance.
The disclosure is the culmination of years of legal battles that have unfolded everywhere from the presidential campaign to Congress to the Supreme Court. Trump’s persistent refusal to share details about his financial history goes against the transparency practices followed by all his predecessors in the post-Watergate era.Record release comes days before Republicans regain control of the House A few weeks after Trump launched another campaign for the White House.
Records show how Trump capped his income by offsetting corporate losses and millions of dollars in business expenses, asset depreciation and other deductions.
Trump paid $641,931 in federal income taxes in 2015 when he ran for president, but just $750 in 2016 and 2017, according to a report released last week by Congress’ bipartisan Joint Taxation Committee. I paid only dollars. He paid about $1 million in 2018, only $133,445 in 2019 and nothing in 2020.
The records also detail Trump’s foreign assets.
Despite being commander-in-chief, Trump reported having bank accounts in China, Ireland and the United Kingdom from 2015 to 2017, according to the filings. Since 2018, however, he has reported only UK accounts.It also shows that Trump claimed foreign tax credits for taxes he paid on various business ventures around the world.Scotland and Irish course. Over the years, Trump has paid more foreign taxes on reported income in countries including Azerbaijan, China, India, Indonesia, Panama, the Philippines, St. Martin’s, Turkey, and the United States than net U.S. federal income taxes. It seems that United Arab Emirates.
Documents show Trump’s charitable giving fluctuated during his presidency but represented a tiny fraction of his earnings in his final years. Coronavirus ravaged economy 2020 In 2018, Trump reported no charitable donations. In 2019 and his 2018, he reportedly wrote donation checks for about $500,000. Early numbers were higher, in 2017 he had $1.8 million and in 2016 he had $1.1 million.
It is unclear whether the reported amount includes President Trump’s annual salary of $400,000.
Jeff Hoops, an accounting professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Flagler School of Business, describes Trump’s taxes as “large, complex profits from businesses set up to be complex” and “a world There are hundreds of entities scattered throughout.” “
He said many of these entities are somewhat unprofitable and “pretty magical when it comes to tax law.”
“Both look the same, so it’s hard to tell if someone is really bad at business or really good at tax planning.
New York University tax professor Daniel Shabiro said the auditors should raise suspicions that many of Trump’s businesses have suffered huge financial losses despite healthy sales. rice field.
“If he was a prominent businessman, not a politician, we would really want to audit him thoroughly,” Shabiro said. “There is something fishy here.”
Shaviro also gives examples of questionable or sloppy calculations even in smaller companies, such as an airline called “DT Endeavor I LLC,” which reported both revenue and expenses of $160,144 in 2020. I mentioned. A perfect match like this is rare, he says, Shaviro. However, the form also reports him losing $18,923.
“Returns don’t say, ‘What do you think?’ I am committing fraud,” Shabiro said.
The release marks the latest setback for Trump, who has been plagued by investigations including federal and state investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. – Investigating a series of classified documents found at Lago and possible attempts to sabotage the investigation.
In a statement on Friday, Trump lashed out at the Democrats and the Supreme Court for their release.
“It’s going to be terrifying for so many people,” he said. It’s the way!”
Earnings, he said, “show how proudly I’ve been and how I’ve used depreciation and various other tax deductions to build my business.”
Rep. Don Beyer, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, who presided over the House’s regular pro forma session on Friday, said personal and other identifying information would be redacted to ensure returns are treated discreetly. I said that great care was taken.
“We’ve been very careful to make sure we’re not ‘weaponizing’ IRS returns,” D-Va’s Beyer said. He is also a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which voted partisanly. We published our earnings last week.
The filing details how Trump has used tax law to minimize liability, including carrying forward huge losses from previous years, as tax law allows. During the 2016 campaign, Trump said he would be “smarter” if he paid little or no income tax on his income for some years.
For example, in 2020, more than 150 of Trump’s entities listed negative qualifying business income. It is defined by the IRS as “the net amount of eligible items of income, profits, deductions, and losses from qualifying transactions or business.” That tax year total, plus nearly $9 million in losses carried forward from the previous year, put Trump’s eligible losses in the final year of his presidency in excess of his $58 million.
Another of Trump’s losers is the skating rink his company operated in New York City’s Central Park until last year. Trump reported losses totaling $2.6 million from Wollman Link over the six years it went public. and reported a loss of $1.3 million in 2015, despite earning $9.3 million in revenue. returned to a state of dissolving.
As an up-and-coming Manhattan real estate developer in the 1980s, Trump’s financial situation was shrouded in mystery.
Trump, who is known for building skyscrapers and hosting a reality show before winning the White House, has stated his holdings and income in the mandatory disclosure forms and financial statements he provides to banks to secure loans. provided limited details on, and to justify his position with, financial magazines on the World’s Billionaires Rankings.
Trump’s longtime accounting firm has since denied the statement, and New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit. It alleges that Trump and his Trump Organization fraudulently inflated property values in the statement. Trump and his company deny any wrongdoing.
In October 2018, The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning series based on leaked tax records that contradicted the image Trump attempted to market himself as a self-made businessman. It showed that Trump received at least $413 million, the equivalent of modern times, from his father’s property holdings.
A second series in 2020 showed that Trump, in 10 of the last 15 years, had paid no income tax at all because he generally lost more money than he earned.
In a report last week, the Ways and Means Commission indicated that the Trump administration may have ignored a requirement to audit the president’s tax returns..
It wasn’t until April 3, 2019 (more than two years after he took office) that the IRS began auditing Trump’s 2016 tax returns on April 3, 2019. Return value.
Every president and major party candidate since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released at least a summary of their tax information to the public. As a candidate and as president, Trump has bucked that trend, repeatedly insisting his taxes are “under audit” and cannot be made public.
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Associated Press writers Chris Lugover and Gary Fields, Paul Weisman and Farnoush Amiri of Washington, Meg Kinnard of Columbia, South Carolina, and Nicholas Ricardi of Denver contributed to this report.