The Times obtained Donald Trump’s tax information extending over more than two decades, revealing struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
Donald
J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In
his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.
He
had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely
because he reported losing much more money than he made.
As
the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of
losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions
of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging
over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over
the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received,
after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100
million.
The
tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story
fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His
reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions
of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to
avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show
that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in
potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
The
New York Times has obtained tax-return data extending over more than two
decades for Mr. Trump and the hundreds of companies that make up his business
organization, including detailed information from his first two years in
office. It does not include his personal returns for 2018 or 2019. This article
offers an overview of The Times’s findings; additional articles will be
published in the coming weeks.
The
returns are some of the most sought-after, and speculated-about, records in
recent memory. In Mr. Trump’s nearly four years in office — and across his
endlessly hyped decades in the public eye — journalists, prosecutors,
opposition politicians and conspiracists have, with limited success, sought to
excavate the enigmas of his finances. By their very nature, the filings will
leave many questions unanswered, many questioners unfulfilled. They comprise
information that Mr. Trump has disclosed to the I.R.S., not the findings of an
independent financial examination. They report that Mr. Trump owns hundreds of
millions of dollars in valuable assets, but they do not reveal his true wealth.
Nor do they reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.
Read
more at:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html
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