New York Times: 'We the People' Demand Mr. Trump Release His Tax Returns

By Times Editorial Board:

The administration dismisses these pleas for honesty, arguing that only journalists care about Mr. Trump’s tax returns and conflicts of interest — a claim that a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll disproved. It found that 74 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Republicans, believe that Mr. Trump’s tax returns should be made public.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to Mr. Trump and his chief obfuscator, told ABC News on Sunday that “he’s not going to release his tax returns,” adding that the election showed that “people didn’t care.” On Monday, she pulled back a tad, tweeting that “POTUS is under audit and will not release until that is completed.” Of course, even that comment is a ruse. The Internal Revenue Service has made clear that being under audit wouldn’t preclude Mr. Trump from making his returns public.

Yet, the Trump campaign used that excuse over and over, and now Mr. Trump has carried it into the White House. White House officials are probably hoping that the longer they stonewall, the more likely that public demands on this matter will be pushed aside as torrents of controversial policies and statements from Mr. Trump dominate the news cycle. Even so, voters and members of Congress who care about ethics in the nation’s highest office should not let up.

Full Story (January 24, 2017)

Truth-Out: For Trump's Rich Appointees, Death May Be Certain but Taxes Aren't

By Allan Sloan and Cezary Podkul:

Rather, we want to show you how combining this tax break with repeal of the estate tax -- a cherished Republican goal that could be achieved this year - can turn a temporary tax benefit into permanent tax avoidance, enriching the appointees and their heirs.

We're dealing with substantial money here: at a minimum, tens of millions of deferred capital gains taxes; at a maximum, hundreds of millions. We can't tell until we analyze filings that appointees haven't yet made with the Office of Government Ethics. One wild card is their holdings outside of the publicly traded companies with which some of them are associated, because we don't know what they would have to sell, how much of a gain they would have and how much in capital gains taxes they could defer. Rex Tillerson, for example, owns $28 million to $100 million in land and securities other than ExxonMobil, according to a Dec. 31 report he filed with the ethics office that listed more than 400 holdings.

Other very-well-off Trump appointees whose pending jobs will almost surely make them tax deferral candidates include Wilbur Ross, who made vast sums restructuring bankrupt steel companies; Gary Cohn, former No. 2 executive at Goldman Sachs; Steven Mnuchin, who made a huge profit buying a dead savings institution from the FDIC, reviving it and selling it to CIT, and also has extensive private holdings; Andy Puzder, chief executive of privately held CKE, a big restaurant chain; Linda McMahon, former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment; and Betsy DeVos, a scion of a rich family who married into the family of the co-founder of the Amway multilevel marketing firm, now known as Quixtar.

The Full Story (January 20, 2017)

Washington Post: Trump to Name Goldman Sachs Veteran Gary Cohn to Head National Economic Council

By Renae Merle, Ylan Q. Mui and Philip Rucker:

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name a top Goldman Sachs executive, Gary Cohn, to lead the National Economic Council, handing the Wall Street veteran significant sway over his administration’s economic policy.

The council includes the heads of various departments and agencies and works within the administration to coordinate economic policy. As director, Cohn would be in position to advise Trump as he attempts to fulfill some of his chief campaign promises, including lowering corporate taxes and rethinking U.S. trade policy.

Trump intends to formally name Cohn to the post, which does not require Senate confirmation, but additional details remained unclear, according to a transition official who spoke on the condition of anonymity and was not authorized to speak publicly. The expected appointment was first reported by NBC News.

In Cohn, Trump would once again be picking a veteran of a New York investment bank that he repeatedly denounced during the campaign. During the campaign Trump argued that Goldman held “total control” over both Democrat Hillary Clinton and GOP rival Ted Cruz and he even released a television ad that flashed an image of Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein and warned of a “global power structure” that was robbing American workers.

The Full Story (December 9, 2016)

See also: Trump Said to Offer Goldman's Cohn National Economic Council Job by Dakin Campbell and Saleha Mohsin of Bloomberg News.

[Special] Washington Post Article Dump, December 2016 Edition

• Trump’s Demagogic Illogic Strikes Again by Kathleen Parker (December 2, 2016):

More than a month and a half away from Inauguration Day, Trump’s only discipline seems to be making good on bad faith. His attacks both on the media and on those who, rather rarely, burn an American flag, are fundamentally assaults on the Constitution and the First Amendment.

• Trump’s Proposed Tax ‘Reform’ is Hardly Reform at All by the WaPo Editorial Board (December 2, 2016):

President-elect Donald Trump and his team are sending mixed signals. During the campaign, he put forward an irresponsible plan to slash revenue by an estimated $620 billion per year (roughly 19 percent of fiscal 2015 receipts) over 10 years, with no credible offset in the form of spending cuts. Meanwhile, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers would experience an average tax cut of nearly $1.1 million, while households in the middle fifth of the income distribution would receive an average tax cut of $1,010, according to the Tax Policy Center . On Wednesday, however, Mr. Trump’s choice for secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, spoke reassuringly, but cryptically, of middle-class relief with “no absolute tax cut for the upper class.” Rate cuts for the rich could be offset by eliminating itemized deductions, such as the break for mortgage interest or state and local taxes, Mr. Mnuchin said, though most experts say that won’t actually work for the rates Mr. Trump proposed.

• A Guide to All the Ways Trump’s Transition is Like a Reality Show by Elahe Izadi and Emily Yahr (December 2, 2016):

Princeton University presidential historian Sean Wilentz put it this way: “No previous president-elect, let alone president, has acted with the high-pitched drama that Trump has displayed. Five crises a day — keep ’em coming.”

• Trump’s Emerging Cabinet is Looking Less Trumpian Than Expected by John Wagner and Sean Sullivan (December 3, 2016):

The emerging Cabinet has gone a long way toward mollifying some of Trump’s Republican critics, and several of the picks — including the wife of the Senate majority leader as transportation secretary — are tailor-made to encourage cooperation between the administration and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill. The incoming team is preparing not only to implement longtime Republican goals — such as repealing the Affordable Care Act and cutting taxes — but also to push for Trump’s iconoclastic and controversial campaign promises on issues such as a border wall and trade.

• Trump’s Taiwan Phone Call Was Long Planned, Say People Who Were Involved by Anne Gearan, Philip Rucker and Simon Denyer (December 4, 2016):

The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers about a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan that began even before he became the Republican presidential nominee, according to people involved in or briefed on the talks.

New York Times: Donald Trump Used Legally Dubious Method to Avoid Paying Taxes

By David Barstow, Mike McIntire, Patricia Cohen, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner:

But newly obtained documents show that in the early 1990s, as he scrambled to stave off financial ruin, Mr. Trump avoided reporting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxable income by using a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.

Thanks to this one maneuver, which was later outlawed by Congress, Mr. Trump potentially escaped paying tens of millions of dollars in federal personal income taxes. It is impossible to know for sure because Mr. Trump has declined to release his tax returns, or even a summary of his returns, breaking a practice followed by every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate for more than four decades.

Tax experts who reviewed the newly obtained documents for The New York Times said Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance maneuver, conjured from ambiguous provisions of highly technical tax court rulings, clearly pushed the edge of the envelope of what tax laws permitted at the time. “Whatever loophole existed was not ‘exploited’ here, but stretched beyond any recognition,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center who helped draft tax legislation in the early 1990s.

The Full Story (October 31, 2016)

Talking Points Memo: Unraveling The Mystery of How Trump Landed Himself a Middle Class Tax Break

By Lauren Fox:

Donald Trump received a middle class tax credit on a Park Avenue condo that his campaign acknowledges he never actually lived in, even though only primary residences were eligible for the New York property tax credit, TPM has learned.

* * *

TPM came across the problematic tax credit in the course of examining Trump’s use of the tax credit on another property, his penthouse in Trump Tower in recent years. The city had ruled the penthouse was enrolled to get the tax credit by mistake, but a closer examination suggests mistake or not, Trump would have had to meet the state's income requirements to qualify for the credit: taxable income of no more than $500,000 a year.

The upshot is that there is reason to suspect that Trump suffered additional losses sometime after 1995 that he used to drive down his taxable income and ultimately his income tax burden.

Taken together with the partial Trump tax returns published by the Times, the story of the Trump property tax credits casts new light on Trump’s wealth and how it came to be that a billionaire real estate developer was scrounging a roughly $300 tax credit intended for middle class New Yorkers who made $500,000 a year or less.

The Full Story (October 7, 2016)

Editor's Note: As a companion piece, please see this earlier tax story by Crain's.

Washington Post: Trump’s Tax Mystery Points Toward the Dealings Around His First Bankruptcies

By Drew Harwell and Robert O'Harrow Jr.:

In 1995, Donald Trump was in the midst of a spending spree. He had recently bought a 727 jet for personal use, added a skyscraper to his Manhattan real estate portfolio and snapped up properties in Telluride, Colo., and Palm Beach, Fla., financial records show.

That same year, he said he had negative $916 million in “federal adjusted gross income,” a claim that gave him the prospect of avoiding federal income taxes for years to come.

So how could he be thriving and avoiding taxes at the same time?

Washington Post: As News of Trump’s Taxes Breaks, He Goes Off Script at a Rally in Pennsylvania

By Jenna Johnson:

Donald Trump's campaign announced Saturday evening that the candidate would soon deliver a nine-sentence critique of comments Hillary Clinton made months ago about many of the millennials supporting her primary rival, Bernie Sanders. It was an attempt to latch onto a new headline in hopes of finally escaping the controversies that had consumed his week.

It didn’t work.

It took Trump nearly 25 minutes to read the brief statement because he kept going off on one angry tangent after another — ignoring his teleprompters and accusing Clinton of not being “loyal” to her husband, imitating her buckling at a memorial service last month, suggesting that she is “crazy” and saying she should be in prison. He urged his mostly white crowd of supporters to go to polling places in "certain areas" on Election Day to "watch" the voters there. He also repeatedly complained about having a "bum mic" at the first presidential debate and wondered if he should have done another season of “The Apprentice.”

As Trump ranted in this rural Pennsylvania town, The New York Times reported it had anonymously received Trump’s 1995 income tax returns, which show he declared a loss of $916 million -- a loss that he could use to avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

The Full Story (October 2, 2016)

Atlantic: The Strange Tale of Trump's Taxes

By David A. Graham 

During Monday’s first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton offered her own theory: Trump is paying no taxes. And the Republican nominee seemed in the moment to confirm it, interjecting to say it would prove he was “smart.”

* * *

As Clinton pointed out during the debate, the last time Trump’s tax returns were made public, during the process of applying for a casino license in the 1980s, they showed he had paid no income tax. The veteran business journalist James B. Stewart recently explained why real-estate law made it possible, and perhaps even likely, that he continued to pay no income tax.

Perhaps Trump misspoke during the debate, or perhaps he committed a Kinsley gaffe—accidentally telling the truth—but his conflicting answers make it hard to know what the truth about his taxes is. There’s one very easy way he could clear up the confusion.

The Full Story (September 27, 2016)

(Editor's Note: To the surprise of no one, Trump admitted, during the second debate, to not paying any federal income taxes)

Washington Post: Trump Directed $2.3 Million Owed to Him to His Tax-Exempt Foundation Instead

By David A. Fahrenthold:

Donald Trump’s charitable foundation has received approximately $2.3 million from companies that owed money to Trump or one of his businesses but were instructed to pay Trump’s tax-exempt foundation instead, according to people familiar with the transactions.

In cases where he diverted his own income to his foundation, tax experts said, Trump would still likely be required to pay taxes on the income. Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns. His campaign said he paid income tax on one of the donations, but did not respond to questions about the others.

* * *

“This is so bizarre, this laundry list of issues,” said Marc Owens, the longtime head of the Internal Revenue Service office that oversees nonprofit organizations who is now in private practice. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen this, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years in the IRS, and 40 years total.”

The laws governing the diversion of income into a foundation were written, in part, to stop charity leaders from funneling income that should be taxed into a charity and then using that money to benefit themselves. Such violations can bring monetary penalties, the loss of tax-exempt status, and even criminal charges in extreme cases.

New York Times: A Trump Empire Built on Inside Connections and $885 Million in Tax Breaks

By Charles V. Bagli:

The way Donald J. Trump tells it, his first solo project as a real estate developer, the conversion of a faded railroad hotel on 42nd Street into the sleek, 30-story Grand Hyatt, was a triumph from the very beginning.

The hotel, Mr. Trump bragged in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best seller, “was a hit from the first day. Gross operating profits now exceed $30 million a year.”

But that book, and numerous interviews over the years, make little mention of a crucial factor in getting the hotel built: an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980.

The project set the pattern for Mr. Trump’s New York career: He used his father’s, and, later, his own, extensive political connections, and relied on a huge amount of assistance from the government and taxpayers in the form of tax breaks, grants and incentives to benefit the 15 buildings at the core of his Manhattan real estate empire.

Since then, Mr. Trump has reaped at least $885 million in tax breaks, grants and other subsidies for luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings in New York, according to city tax, housing and finance records. The subsidies helped him lower his own costs and sell apartments at higher prices because of their reduced taxes.

The Full Story (September 17, 2016)

[Special] Editorial: Donald Trump's Tax Scandal

You may have seen that the New York Times dropped a bombshell on Saturday. If you missed it, allow me to share. In an article called Trump Tax Records Obtained by The Times Reveal He Could Have Avoided Paying Taxes for Nearly Two Decades, written by David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Megan Twohey, the Times leads off with this:

Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.

While the idea of a millionaire or billionaire going nearly two decades without paying taxes would leave a bad taste in the mouth of anyone but the most strident Libertarian or Trump supporter, it may be more than just gaming the system ("that makes me smart," Trump quipped in response to Hillary Clinton's speculation that maybe Trump "didn't pay any federal income tax"). In fact, there might be something inherently dishonest, and possibly fraudulent, about what Trump has done.

New York Times: Trump Casinos’ Tax Debt Was $30 Million. Then Christie Took Office.

by Russ Buettner:

By the time Chris Christie became governor of New Jersey, the state’s auditors and lawyers had been battling for several years to collect long-overdue taxes owed by the casinos founded by his friend Donald J. Trump.

The total, with interest, had grown to almost $30 million. The state had doggedly pursued the matter through two of the casinos’ bankruptcy cases and even accused the company led by Mr. Trump of filing false reports with state casino regulators about the amount of taxes it had paid.

But the year after Governor Christie, a Republican, took office, the tone of the litigation shifted. The state entertained settlement offers. And in December 2011, after six years in court, the state agreed to accept just $5 million, roughly 17 cents on the dollar of what auditors said the casinos owed.

Tax authorities sometimes settle for lesser amounts to avoid the costs and risks of further litigation, legal experts said, but the steep discount granted to the Trump casinos and the relationship between the two men raise inevitable questions about special treatment.

The Full Story (August 16, 2016)

Crain's New York Business: Trump qualified for a tax break for New Yorkers making $500K or less

By Aaron Elstein:

It's called the STAR program, which stands for the New York State School Tax Relief Program and has been around since 1997. It offers an approximately $300 annual benefit for those who qualify. Hundreds of thousands of New York homeowners get it.

Here's where it gets interesting for Trump: To be eligible for STAR, a married couple must have annual income of $500,000 or less. One wouldn't think a guy as rich as Trump claims to be would qualify, but records filed with the city's Department of Finance show he received a $302 STAR benefit on his latest property-tax bill for his Trump Tower penthouse on Fifth Avenue.

That means whatever his annual income is, it's less than $500,000. (The state defines income for STAR purposes as federal adjusted gross income minus the taxable amount of total distributions from annuities or individual retirement accounts.) And Trump would have to have declared his New York apartment as his primary residence and sent the state a copy of his federal income-tax return in order to qualify for the $302 tax break.

"It's strange that a billionaire would apply for a $302 tax benefit and, moreover, that he would take it," said Martha Stark, a property-tax expert and former New York City finance commissioner who is now a lecturer at Baruch College.

The Full Article (March 8, 2016)

[Editor's Note: A follow-up article is included below]

Crain's New York Business: Trump's latest property tax bill, out June 3, shows he once again received a middle-class tax break, by Aaron Elstein:

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee’s latest property tax bill shows he was awarded a credit under the STAR program, or the New York State School Tax Relief Program. To be eligible for STAR, a married couple must have annual income of $500,000 or less. You wouldn’t think a guy as rich as Trump claims to be would qualify, but he has received the credit for several years and records filed over the weekend with the city’s Department of Finance show he received a $304 STAR tax break for his Trump Tower penthouse.

While the amount of the credit is trivial for a high-roller, the fact that Trump gets it calls into question his claims that he's "really rich" with a fortune worth in excess of $10 billion. Trump's tax bill comes to around $96,611 after receiving a condo abatement worth $20,493.

Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the city made an error in providing the tax credit and a correction "is in process." When Crain’s first reported on the STAR credit in March, a spokeswoman for the mayor’s office agreed an error had been made, though she wouldn’t explain how it happened. On Monday, however, a  city spokeswoman told CNN that it was "reviewing Mr. Trump's exemption status," which suggests the city isn't so sure it made a mistake.

The city’s Department of Finance has said it checks with New York state tax authorities every year to make sure applicants for the STAR benefit have income under $500,000. The state receives a list of STAR recipients every year and notifies the city of who is eligible. The state defines income for STAR purposes as federal adjusted gross income minus the taxable amount of total distributions from annuities or individual retirement accounts.

The Full Article (June 6, 2016)