Poor Stallman

>>394 part 4 https://www.stallman.org/archives/2020-jul-oct.html#4_October_2020_(What_we_have_learned_from_the_conman's_tax_returns) -- A thorough report on what we have learned from the conman's tax returns. -- https://www.deccanherald.com/international/world-news-politics/donald-trump-did-not-pay-income-tax-in-10-of-last-15-years-894048.html -- Donald Trump did not pay income tax in 10 of last 15 years -- Sep 28 2020

After plans for a Trump-branded mini-city on the Far West Side of Manhattan stalled in the 1990s, Trump’s stake was sold by his partner to Vornado Realty Trust. Trump objected to the sale in court, saying he had not been consulted, but he ended up with a 30 per cent share of two valuable office buildings owned and operated by Vornado. His share of the profits through the end of 2018 totaled $176.5 million, with depreciation factored in. He has never had to invest more money in the partnership, tax records show. Among businesses he runs, Trump’s first success remains his best. The retail and commercial spaces at Trump Tower, completed in 1983, have reliably delivered more than $20 million a year in profits, a total of $336.3 million since 2000 that has done much to help keep him afloat. Trump has an established track record of stiffing his lenders. But the tax returns reveal that he has failed to pay back far more money than previously known: a total of $287 million since 2010.

The IRS considers forgiven debt to be income, but Trump was able to avoid taxes on much of that money by reducing his ability to declare future business losses. For the rest, he took advantage of a provision of the Great Recession bailout that allowed income from canceled debt to be completely deferred for five years, then spread out evenly over the next five. He declared the first $28.2 million in 2014. Once again, his business losses mostly absolved his tax responsibilities. He paid no federal income taxes for 2014. Trump was periodically required to pay a parallel income tax called the alternative minimum tax, created as a tripwire to prevent wealthy people from using huge deductions, including business losses, to entirely wipe out their tax liabilities. Trump paid alternative minimum tax in seven years between 2000 and 2017 — a total of $24.3 million, excluding refunds he received after filing. For 2015, he paid $641,931, his first payment of any federal income tax since 2010.

As he settled into the Oval Office, his tax bills soon returned to form. His potential taxable income in 2016 and 2017 included $24.8 million in profits from sources related to his celebrity status and $56.4 million for the loans he did not repay. The dreaded alternative minimum tax would let his business losses erase only some of his liability. Each time, he requested an extension to file his 1040; and each time, he made the required payment to the IRS for income taxes he might owe — $1 million for 2016 and $4.2 million for 2017. But virtually all of that liability was washed away when he eventually filed, and most of the payments were rolled forward to cover potential taxes in future years. To cancel out the tax bills, Trump made use of $9.7 million in business investment credits, at least some of which related to his renovation of the Old Post Office hotel, which qualified for a historic-preservation tax break. Although he had more than enough credits to owe no taxes at all, his accountants appear to have carved out an allowance for a small tax liability for both 2016 and 2017. When they got to line 56, the one for income taxes due, the amount was the same each year: $750.

“The Apprentice” created what was probably the biggest income tax bite of Trump’s life. During the Great Recession bailout, he asked for the money back. Testifying before Congress in February 2019, the president’s estranged personal lawyer, Cohen, recalled Trump’s showing him a huge check from the US Treasury some years earlier and musing “that he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.” In fact, confidential records show that starting in 2010 he claimed, and received, an income tax refund totaling $72.9 million — all the federal income tax he had paid for 2005 through 2008, plus interest. The legitimacy of that refund is at the center of the audit battle that he has long been waging, out of public view, with the IRS.

The records that The Times reviewed square with the way Trump has repeatedly cited, without explanation, an ongoing audit as grounds for refusing to release his tax returns. He alluded to it as recently as July on Fox News, when he told Sean Hannity, “They treat me horribly, the IRS, horribly.” And while the records do not lay out all the details of the audit, they match his lawyers’ statement during the 2016 campaign that audits of his returns for 2009 and subsequent years remained open, and involved “transactions or activities that were also reported on returns for 2008 and earlier.” Trump harvested that refund bonanza by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years. But to turn that long arc of failure into a giant refund check, he relied on some deft accounting footwork and an unwitting gift from an unlikely source — Obama.

Business losses can work like a tax-avoidance coupon: A dollar lost on one business reduces a dollar of taxable income from elsewhere. The types and amounts of income that can be used in a given year vary, depending on an owner’s tax status. But some losses can be saved for later use, or even used to request a refund on taxes paid in a prior year. Until 2009, those coupons could be used to wipe away taxes going back only two years. But that November, the window was more than doubled by a little-noticed provision in a bill Obama signed as part of the Great Recession recovery effort. Now business owners could request full refunds of taxes paid in the prior four years and 50 per cent of those from the year before that. Trump had paid no income taxes in 2008. But the change meant that when he filed his taxes for 2009, he could seek a refund of not just the $13.3 million he had paid in 2007 but also the combined $56.9 million paid in 2005 and 2006, when “The Apprentice” created what was likely the biggest income tax bite of his life. The records reviewed by The Times indicate that Trump filed for the first of several tranches of his refund several weeks later, in January 2010. That set off what tax professionals refer to as a “quickie refund,” a check processed in 90 days on a tentative basis, pending an audit by the IRS.