WASHINGTON — President Trump wrote off $100 million in business losses to reduce his federal taxes in 2005, according to forms made public on Tuesday night in a rare glimpse at documents that he has refused to disclose since becoming a candidate for the nation’s highest office.
The
forms showed that Mr. Trump paid $38 million in federal income taxes on
reported income of $150 million, an effective tax rate of 25 percent,
according to Rachel Maddow, who aired them on her MSNBC show. By
claiming losses from previous years, Mr. Trump was able to save tens of
millions of dollars in taxes that he otherwise might have owed.
The
White House responded without even waiting for the show to air, issuing
a statement that seemed to confirm the authenticity of the forms even
as it defended Mr. Trump and assailed the network for publicizing them.
“You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate
the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a
decade ago,” the statement said.
The
White House added: “Before being elected president, Mr. Trump was one
of the most successful businessmen in the world, with a responsibility
to his company, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than
legally required.” In addition to the federal income taxes, the
statement said, he paid “tens of millions of dollars in other taxes,
such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes, and this illegally
published return proves just that.”
Continue reading the main story
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
The
tax forms were sent to David Cay Johnston, a former New York Times
reporter who covered the Internal Revenue Service for years and has
written a book on Mr. Trump. Appearing with Ms. Maddow, he said he had
received the forms “over the transom” and did not know who had sent
them. He suggested that they might even have been sent by Mr. Trump
himself.
Document: Donald Trump’s Tax Documents From 2005
Mr.
Trump’s refusal to make his tax returns public broke with decades of
tradition in presidential contests and emerged as a central issue in the
campaign. That drumbeat has continued since he entered the White House,
particularly from people who feel his returns may shed light on various
aspects of his business practices, including whether he has done
business with Russian firms and banks.
Mr.
Trump initially promised he would release the returns: “I have very big
returns, as you know, and I have everything all approved and very
beautiful, and we’ll be working that over in the next period of time,”
he said in a January 2016 television interview. He then backpedaled,
saying he would wait until the Internal Revenue Service had completed
its audit. In May 2016, his lawyers released a letter saying that his
personal tax returns had been “under continuous examination” by the
I.R.S. since 2002, and that the examinations for the returns from 2009
on were continuing.
The I.R.S. has not confirmed that Mr. Trump’s taxes are in fact under audit.
Democrats
immediately pounced on Tuesday night’s report, arguing that the White
House’s decision to release details of Mr. Trump’s 2005 taxes before Ms.
Maddow’s show undercut his past refusal to release any such
information.
“If
they can release some of the information, they can release all of the
information,” Zac Petkanas, a senior adviser to the Democratic National
Committee, said in a statement. “The only reason not to release his
returns is to hide what’s in them, such as financial connections with
Russian oligarchs and the Kremlin.”
In October, The New York Times published three pages of Mr. Trump’s 1995 returns,
which showed a $916 million tax deduction that could have allowed him
to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years.
This
deduction was derived from the financial wreckage of some of the
companies he drove into bankruptcy years ago, including his Atlantic
City casinos, and would have allowed him to cancel out taxable income
for an 18-year period. A tax code provision benefiting real estate
developers, which took effect in 1993, permitted businesses like Mr.
Trump’s to take tax deductions for losing other people’s money.
Got a confidential news tip?
The New York Times would like to hear from readers who want
to share messages and materials with our journalists.
Few
people outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle have seen his tax returns.
One person who has is Timothy L. O’Brien, another former reporter for
The New York Times, who was sued for libel by Mr. Trump after he
published a book that argued that Mr. Trump’s net worth was $150 million
to $250 million, rather than several billion dollars, as Mr. Trump had
claimed. The suit was ultimately dismissed.
Limited
information about Mr. Trump’s tax returns from other years has surfaced
in court and regulatory records. A 1981 report by New Jersey regulators
assessing Mr. Trump’s fitness for a casino license stated that he had
paid more than $71,000 in federal income taxes on about $218,000 of
taxable income earned from 1975 to 1977.
But
in the next two years, 1978 and 1979, Mr. Trump paid no federal income
taxes. The report explained that by taking advantage of deductions
available to real estate developers and claiming losses from
partnerships, he was able to report a “negative income” of $406,379 in
1978 and $3.4 million in 1979 — thus avoiding any tax liability for
those two years, a time when he claimed to be worth hundreds of millions
of dollars.
Tax
court records indicate that Mr. Trump also avoided paying any federal
income taxes in 1984. In 1991 and 1993, when Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City
casinos were in deep financial trouble, casino commission reports show
that he claimed losses that would have allowed him to avoid paying
income taxes in those years, too. Mr. Trump may have been able to use
those losses to reduce or eliminate his federal tax bill for years to
come.
During
the presidential debates, Hillary Clinton suggested that Mr. Trump was
refusing to release his tax returns to hide the fact that he did not pay
federal income taxes. “That makes me smart,” Mr. Trump retorted during
one debate.
In
response to The Times’s disclosure that Mr. Trump could have used a
$916 million tax loss to avoid paying years of federal income taxes, Mr.
Trump and his surrogates said the revelation merely proved Mr. Trump’s
“genius” at legally avoiding that burden.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment