Documents from the Tax Authority in the United States have revealed how President of the US, Mr. Donald Trump had paid no income tax at all in ten 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.
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According to the New York Times, also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9m tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses.
An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100m.
Information extending over more than two decades, revealed struggling properties, vast write-offs, an audit battle and hundreds of millions in debt coming due.
In 2018, for example, Trump announced in his disclosure that he had made at least $434.9m. The tax records deliver a very different portrait of $47.4 million in losses.
Tax records do not have the specificity to evaluate the legitimacy of every business expense that Trump claims to reduce his taxable income
For instance, without any explanation in his returns, the general and administrative expenses at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey increased five-fold from 2016 to 2017.
But the returns, by his own account, undercut his claims of financial acumen, showing that he is simply pouring more money into many businesses than he is taking out.
The picture that emerges most starkly from the mountain of figures and tax schedules prepared by Trump’s accountants is of a businessman-president in a tightening financial vise.
Most Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.
According go New York Times, his revenue from “The Apprentice” and from licensing deals is drying up, and several years ago he sold nearly all the stocks that now might have helped him plug holes in his struggling properties.
It is expected that within the next four years, more than $300m in loans obligations for which he is personally responsible will come due.
Against that backdrop, the records go much further toward revealing the actual and potential conflicts of interest created by Trump’s refusal to divest himself of his business interests while in the White House.
His properties have become an avenue for collecting money directly from lobbyists, foreign officials and others seeking face time, access or favor; the records for the first time put precise dollar figures on those transactions.
At the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., a flood of new members starting in 2015 allowed him to make an additional $5m a year from the business.
In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,602 to the Washington hotel, where the group held at least one event during its four-day World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians.
When he took office, Trump said he would pursue no new foreign deals as president. Even so, in his first two years in the White House, his revenue from abroad totaled $73m.
While much of that money was from his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland, some came from licensing deals in countries with authoritarian-leaning leaders or thorny geopolitics.
For example, he made $3m from the Philippines, $2.3m from India and $1m from Turkey.
He was reported to have paid taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the President’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was said to be dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.