Donald Trump’s Taxes Show Wide Use of Real-Estate Losses

The details include how Trump had to submit a report to the U.S. government on his economic ties with China and other countries, and how he donated $3 of his tax dollars to a fund that finances the presidential election. It includes things like always checking the box on the declaration to send money. When Trump ran for president in 2016 and 2020, he opted out of the public funding system.

House Democrats said they needed the materials to oversee the Internal Revenue Service’s annual audit of the president’s tax returns. Trump and Republicans called it an invasion of taxpayer privacy for political reasons.

“Our findings turned out to be simple: The IRS did not initiate a mandatory audit of the former president until after I made the first request.” We have decided to release the relevant documents in order to fully understand the failure of

A Dec. 15 IRS letter disputed Mr. Neal’s statement, stating that an audit of the 2015 Trump tax returns was scheduled for January 2018 rather than April 2019, when Mr. Neal made his initial request. said to have been started in As of Dec. 15, Trump’s returns from 2015 to 2019 and several years before are still under review.

“The Democrats should never have done that and the Supreme Court should never have approved it,” Trump said in an emailed statement on Friday. The statement said the earnings showed how depreciation and other tax credits were used as incentives to create jobs.

A tax return showed new details about a Washington hotel housed in a former post office building leased by the federal government. It was controversial because foreign delegations and wealthy Republican donors often stayed there.

Audited financial reports released by the Democratic-led House Oversight and Reform Committee in 2021 show operating income for some fiscal years, but exclude lease payments and mortgage depreciation. After that, the hotel posted a net loss every year. of President Trump. A similar loss was then recorded on the business tax return of his DJT Holdings, one of Trump’s entities.

2018 was the best-performing year for hotels under the Trump Organization, with audited financials showing that DJT Holdings’ business tax returns were $1,400, despite an operating profit of about $3.9 million. showed a net loss of over $10,000. Property developers typically use depreciation and other methods to reduce profits or show losses on their assets.

New York University Law School professor Daniel Shabiro said the losses attributed to the Washington, D.C. hotel were “a little dubious” given that high-profile guests frequently booked during Trump’s tenure. I doubt it a little bit,” Shabiro said. “That’s a good example of why you want to audit things, because he had to make money out of the hotel financially.”

Shabiro said last week’s bipartisan congressional report was right to warn about what the IRS should audit. It can be a process that spans several years.

The Trump organization sold the hotel to CGI Merchant Group, a Miami-based investment firm, for $375 million in early 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.

Trump, who has run businesses and invested around the world, said on his tax returns that he must report to the US government about foreign financial accounts in Ireland, the UK and China.

According to joint tax returns from 2015 to 2020 with his wife, Melania, the deductible for cash donations to charity increased from $0 in 2020, when the couple did not report taxable income, to a high in 2017. The amount ranged up to $1,860,963. organization they donated.

The couple’s total cash donation that year was $4.19 million. Additionally, in 2015 and she had a conservation easement deduction in 2016.

Documents show that some of the cash donations flowed to Trump’s personal returns from entities such as DJT Holdings, Mar-a-Lago Club and The Trump Corporation.

Some of the donations were very small. In 2015, the Trumps reported a $3 donation from the Mar-Arago Club, and in 2016, he reported an $8 donation from TNGC Pine Hill.

The filings released Friday showed Trump, like many other taxpayers in New York, is affected by the $10,000 limit on state and local tax credits he signed into law in late 2017. was For example, he reported that he paid over $10 million in state and local taxes in 2018, but he was only able to deduct $10,000.

However, it is not easy to fully determine the impact of that cap limit on his taxes. Although his income was surplus in 2018, Mr. Trump was subject to the alternative minimum tax, a parallel tax regime. Those rules severely limited or denied deduction benefits even before the 2017 law capped him at $10,000.

In 2019, Trump won $4,739 in alternative-fuel vehicle refueling credits. Trump reportedly paid $19,411 in medical and dental bills in 2015. That same year, Wollman, the Central Park ice skating operation he managed at the time, reported that he lost $1.3 million on his $9.3 million in earnings at his rink.

Mr Trump and his wife reportedly had negative income for four of the six years from 2015 to 2020, according to previously released documents. 3 out of 6 years.

The couple’s adjusted gross income dropped to minus $53.2 million during that period. From 2015 to 2020, Trump’s total federal tax burden was $4.4 million, according to the commission’s report.

A House committee last week voted to approve disclosure in line with party policy after more than four hours of closed-door meetings. The Commission used a section of the tax code that allows the Commissioner of Revenue to request taxpayer returns and related files from her IRS. The same law allows committees to release documents as part of their reports to the House of Representatives.

Democrats profited after a lengthy legal battle. The Trump administration has refused to comply with the 2019 document’s demands, starting a legal battle over whether Democrats had a legitimate legislative purpose for the demands.

This situation continued until November, when the Supreme Court refused to stay the lower court’s ruling, giving the Board of Revenue access to the documents.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas), the top Republican on the committee, said there was no legislative purpose behind the Democrats’ demands. “This is a regrettable stain on the Ways and Means Commission and Congress that will make American politics even more divided and disheartening,” he said.

—Laura Saunders, Jennifer S. Forsyth, Alex Leary, and Jan Wolfe contributed to this article.

The email address for Richard Rubin is [email protected].