Even through the rounds of tumult he’s faced as part of his administration, President Donald Trump has not let up with his claim that everything is getting along just fine. However, he’s facing possible tax bills from New York state to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a recent report from Crain’s New York Business based on estimates from people “in the know.”
Those bills stem from reported mass amounts of financial benefit transmitted down through the Trump family that they avoided paying taxes on through a combination of legal and possibly illegal schemes. More than $1 billion worth of gifts to the president and his siblings from their parents flew under tax authorities’ radar — despite Trump’s claim, it’s worth noting, that he’s essentially a self-made man who “only” got by on a $1 million loan from his father in building his global real estate empire.
In reality, he’s routinely boosted his numbers. In decades past, he’s fought through means including a fake identity to have himself higher up in Forbes rankings of the wealthiest people, and more recently, he’s offered estimations of his worth that blow up because of an arbitrary value in the billions that he places on his own last name. Through it all, he’s kept his tax returns from public view, breaking with decades of presidential candidate precedent in the process.
These issues could come back to bite him big time more than they already have. According to longtime CPA Fred Slater, who’s worked with these issues for decades, the Trump children — meaning President Trump and his siblings — could owe $210 million in raw taxes on the real estate gifts they got from their parents and roughly the same amount in unpaid interest and penalties. Slater added that the president could be liable for a larger share of the bills since he signed the tax returns for the estates he and his siblings benefited from. He based his estimations on the 21 percent tax rate New York charged on the type of gifts the eventual President Trump benefited from.
What portion of that, if any, the Trumps will be held liable for remains to be seen. The state has been investigating — and the president is already facing legal trouble over his defunct charitable foundation over the fraud it carried on with.
Going forward, the issue isn’t just confined to gifts that should have been better reported. In fact, in order to pad their incomes, the Trumps also carried on with schemes like pushing their money through sham front companies that they owned — and using a concurrent falsified increase in charges associated with their projects to raise rent. A one-time $10 rent increase in 1995 on 8,000 apartments under the Trumps’ purview translates to a whopping $33 million in rent that tenants overpaid as a side effect of the Trumps’ tax schemes.
And we’re supposed to trust this guy to be president of the United States why again? These issues are in addition to his continued legal exposure from issues like the Russia investigation, which remains ongoing.
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