Just to note, there is a law prohibiting the disclosure of tax information.
However, from my reading of it (I am not a lawyer or other expert in tax law) it is pretty specific in who it applies to. And a member of Congress is not an officer or employee of the US or a specific state. (An employee is someone hired into a job, as I am an employee of Washington State, and an officer is someone appointed like a judge, ambassador, or cabinet member.) Elected officials aren’t subject to this law, nor is anyone else who isn’t an federal or state employee or officer unless they acquired that information from an employee or officer in the course of their duties.
So, let’s say a government clerk gets someone’s tax return information from their work and posts it on a web site. They might be in violation. Let’s say that clerk instead gives that to their buddy, or a reporter. If that person publishes the info, they might be in violation.
If someone carelessly throws away their tax returns in an overflowing garbage can and someone out for a jog sees it sitting on the sidewalk and picks it up, they can probably do whatever they want with it.
And in this case, the SCOTUS said that Congress can have it, likely knowing full well that they can later choose to make it public if they wanted to. So that fight seems to be over.
Again, IANAL, but that explains why there is no huge outcry (from anyone credible at least) over this being illegal. It just ain’t.
This is the most critical part. Trump being a lying bastard is obvious, we really didn’t need any more evidence for that.
But this is the first really solid evidence that Trump used his position to corruptly benefit himself, by putting someone in charge of the IRS that he knew would prevent the legally-required tax audits that presidents are supposed to undergo. This is pretty clear-cut evidence of corruption on several levels, all of which need to be investigated, and, if appropriate, someone should be criminally charged, or at least fired.
It also serves a “legislative purpose” in that it might convince the electorate to elect members of Congress who will support legislation requiring the release of the President’s tax returns, so that the citizens of the US can have confidence that such corruption isn’t happening any more.
Yeah, that’s been my main takeaway. If the IRS rules are that the president’s return be audited annually, then there was certainly some discussion about not doing so. Even if Congress isn’t going to investigate this, Biden has power to launch an investigation, doesn’t he? It constitutes shenanigans in the executive branch, and that’s his branch.
According to the NYT article I linked upthread, the audit of the President and Veep is not legally required. The NYT describes it as a “policy” and a “program”, and links to the IRS manuals. If that is an accurate summary, then I don’t think it’s correct to say the audit is “legally required”. It’s an administrative requirement, under the direction of the executive branch.
Congress could, of course, make it legally required by passing a statutory provision to that effect.
I suspect that the reason why the audit that the IRS Handbook suggests should happen for the President every year wasn’t done for Trump was that it would be orders of magnitude harder. Some people might say that makes it even more worthwhile to do, but keep in mind that the IRS is limited by manpower. When a normal politician is President, there’s probably not much to audit, but for Trump there are apparently over 400 pass-through entities that would also need to be audited. If you don’t audit those too, you’re effectively not auditing his return, since there’s where all the lying could be located. While for most Presidents it’s not much of a burden on the agency’s time, with Trump it absolutely would have been.
I’m not sure though why they wouldn’t just reassign some people who usually deal with this kind of audit to Trump’s return. I can’t imagine they give people like him a pass in general just because it would require so much work. So there’s a few less audits done on some smaller real estate developers to get Trump’s done; I don’t see the huge problem there.
Probably not “the” reason but perhaps a consideration.
However, the fact the audit of his 2016 return did not begin until the very day in 2019 that Congress asked the IRS about it is too suggestive to automatically accord it to coincidence.
If, instead, it turned out that audit began on time but the difficulty meant it was still ongoing years later due to lack of resources, I might accept that as a reasonable possibility.
Basically, the whole thing stinks of probable corruption and due to the layers upon layers of easily provable lies perpetrated by Trump and his coterie of lackeys over a period of several years, no benefit of the doubt should be accorded.
Intentionally. The people dodging their taxes have enough pull with certain politicians (in part because those politicians are among them) that they can ensure that the IRS is always too understaffed to be able to catch them.
Nope. It’s that so danmed many of them are believed by such a large fraction of Americans even now. Both ordinary citizens and politicians and civil servants.
Even if true, they will do nothing with this information. He either paid his bills, in which case they won’t care, or he didn’t pay his bills, in which case pursuing him for bank fraud won’t help them recover anything. And they’d be kicking a hornet’s nest if they tried to use Trump’s hypothetical bank fraud to their advantage.
There could be some lying elsewhere, like taking outsized charitable deductions for donating development rights to charity, but your point is a very good one.
Of all the bad things Trump did, not releasing tax returns is very low on my list, and unless it leads to legal trouble I don’t have a great desire to see them. I do think congress can and should see them, but the public? I not as sure.
Brian
In a vacuum, sure. But it’s such a bald-faced lie. He said he was under audit (lie), he couldn’t release them for that reason (lie), and he would we he could (lie). What a fucking asshole.
but why has he tried so hard to keep them from being released? From the summary, it shows losses, but nothing like OH MY GOD he invested in Putin Stock! Nothing that unusual for a rich man’s tax returns. They play the tax game, thinking they will never be audited, and if they are, they pay the taxes that they didn’t pay, with a fine.
Steve Martin, from a 70s bit - "How to make a million dollars and not pay taxes. First, get a millilon dollars (or forty). Then, don’t pay taxes. And if the IRS asks you why you didn’t pay taxes, say “I forgot”
This isn’t a problem for someone in real estate. You actually expect losses in most years. You make them back when you sell the property. You get cash from renters, and if you need more you refinance the property a few years down the road.
Everyone does this, but none of the evidence they cite is particularly damning just on its own. Plenty of people operate businesses at a loss. As to the businesses that have exactly the same amount of expenses and income, that’s not particularly surprising, as sometimes the 1099s will be in your personal name, but it’s actually the income from one of your entities. So you have to show the income on your personal return as a separate line of business, with all the money paid out to the entity it was actually income for. I don’t know whether this is the case for the specific cases cited and you can’t tell by the type of business, because it’s quite likely that for each business they run, they have a separate S-Corporation entity that files a separate tax return for which the above is the case. They don’t have their W-9 with their entity name and EIN instead of their personal SSN most likely because they personally don’t know how to fill it out and didn’t think to give it to the tax people, not knowing about the entity that those people created for them.
According to the article, the existence of these loans is known about because he was reporting interest income on them. If the loans are paying a reasonable amount of interest, then they clearly are loans and not disguised gifts. It would be more of a problem if there wasn’t interest being paid or recognized as income by the lender. The IRS does require you to impute interest even if it’s not actually paid, so they might still be disguised gifts, but it’s done in a way that the IRS recognizes as perfectly legal because they set rules specifically about what to do in these cases. He’ll need to recognize that interest income every year unless he forgives the loans, at which point they would become completed gifts. If he pays no tax anyway because of losses, that’s less in carryforward losses he has.
Conservation easements are actually a huge problem. But it’s not like it’s specific to Trump at all. The IRS has really been cracking down on these, and I’m not surprised that Trump is involved in some of them, because they are incredibly shady. You basically buy some cheap land somewhere and then get someone to say that the land would be worth much more than you paid for it if it were developed, and then you get to use that as the basis of your tax deduction when you place the conservation easement on the land so that it can’t be developed. If the land were really worth as much as the person making the value claimed if developed, it would sell now for something closer to that price such that this “investment opportunity” wouldn’t be profitable. That doesn’t stop shady people from doing it, and you can only go after them after the fact. So yeah, this is a bad thing to be involved in, but again, it’s perfectly normal shady behavior for rich people.
Claiming payment of foreign taxes paid (that aren’t reported on a 1099 for investments) is certainly something you can cheat on, and it could definitely be that he straight-up lied how much he paid. This is definitely something you can’t catch unless you get audited, but the average person has no way themselves to try to track things down if the tax returns were released.
All told, as I said before, I didn’t think there was going to be much of anything interesting. Everything reported seems perfectly normal for an average rich real estate developer. Lots of shady stuff, sure, but no more than any other person in a similar situation, and if he’s straight up lying about a lot of it, there’s no way we’d really be able to tell. There were hundreds of pass-through entities, which is exactly what we’d expect from him. If anything, I thought he didn’t want to release his taxes because they’d show that he didn’t actually own all the businesses that he claimed to own. And it’s the tax returns of all those businesses that we’d really want to see in order to look for the biggest whoppers; there certainly can be terrible lies on a personal return, especially if there are businesses reported directly on it, but I’d think most of the shadiest stuff went on inside all those entities.
