#TrumpTaxReturns

By Sam Brunson

Image from 401kcalculator.org. CC BY-SA 2.0

For the last several months, I’ve been meeting a guitarist and sometimes other musicians at a Chicago park to play outdoor socially-distanced jazz. This Sunday, driving home, my wife asked me if we knew what Trump had paid in taxes. “Of course not,” I confidently responded. “It looks like we do now,” she said.

And with that, my work goals for this week changed. I’m sure everybody reading this has seen Sunday’s New York Times story (and probably also its follow-up from yesterday). Along with a ton of other tax people, I’ve been trying to make sense of and contextualize the story, both to myself and to the public. And I’ve largely been doing my thinking in real-time on Twitter.[fn1]

I thought that I’d assemble a lot of those Twitter threads here into one place. At most I’ll lightly edit them and I’ll link to the actual threads on Twitter, too. Because over there I included GIFs on almost every tweet and I think I outdid myself. The relevant content will be here, though. Continue reading “#TrumpTaxReturns” →

Trump, Tax Fraud, and the Statute of Limitations

By Sam Brunson

By now I’m sure you’ve read the New York Times story about the Trump gift tax evasion (or, if not that story—which is really, really long—at least a summary of it). There is a lot in there, and I suspect it’ll inspire more than a couple posts here, but I wanted to lead off with the statute of limitations.

Because let’s be real: I’ve always thought of the statute of limitations as being three years or, if you substantially understate your gross income, six years, unless you don’t file a return, in which case it runs forever until you file a return. Since most of the alleged fraud occurred in the 1990s or earlier, even the longer statute would be long passed.

It turns out that my mind entirely skipped over section 6501(c).[fn1] Section 6501(c) says that if you file a “false or fraudulent return,” there is no statute of limitations. The IRS can go in and assess a tax deficiency, with interest and penalties, whenever it wants. Continue reading “Trump, Tax Fraud, and the Statute of Limitations” →

On Trump and Tax Opinions

Every so often, Brunson and Herzig carve out a day to swap long-winded emails, then those emails are published on the Internet.

Sam-

trump-return I am sure you have seen by now the NY Times story about Donald Trump’s purported tax positions from the 1990. The NY Times has been following up on a story they originally published about a month ago reporting that Mr. Trump reportedly had a $990 million net operating loss (“NOL”). After the story, there was rampant speculation about the loss.

If Mr. Trump used exclusively all of his money to buy properties or casinos or whatever and those assets were used in a trade or business and those assets went down in value, Mr. Trump would suffer a real economic loss. This real economic loss would then generate a real tax loss. At the time, most tax experts thought that Mr. Trump may have used some of his money but all used loans. I think I was quoted as saying this was likely given his prior statements about being the king of debt. Continue reading “On Trump and Tax Opinions” →

A $916 Million Loss? #TrumpLeaks

By Sam Brunson

trump-return The New York Times reported tonight that in 1995, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump may have claimed a $916 loss, a loss substantial enough that it could have allowed him to avoid paying taxes for nearly two decades.

The push notification for the story showed up on my phone at 8:30 pm Central time on a Saturday, so I haven’t had time to really dig into it. I’m sure that, over the next few days, we’ll have something more substantive to say. But in the meantime, a couple thoughts: Continue reading “A $916 Million Loss? #TrumpLeaks” →