New York investigating Trump tax dodging

NEW YORK: The New York state tax department said Tuesday it is investigating reports that President Donald Trump helped his parents dodge millions of dollars in taxes and received far more money from his father’s real estate empire than he has claimed in the past.

Earlier, The New York Times said its own exhaustive probe of a vast trove of tax returns and confidential records showed Trump had engaged in suspect tax tactics, including ‘outright fraud’ that greatly inflated the funds he received from his parents.

Trump has stated on numerous occasions that he received little help from his father, New York property developer Fred Trump, in building his fortune.

“The Tax Department is reviewing the allegations in the NYT article and is vigorously pursuing all appropriate avenues of investigation,” New York state TaxationandFinancingspokesman James Gazzale told AFP.

The Times said Trump received the equivalent of US$ 413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate activities — having earned US$ 200,000 a year in today’s dollars by age three. By age eight, he was already a millionaire.

Trump was receiving the equivalent of US$1 million a year from his father shortly after his college graduation, it added, noting that the funds grew to more than US$ 5 million per year when he was in his 40s and 50s.

The Times said the bulk of the funds owed to tax evasion tactics that Trump helped devise, including a ‘sham corporation’ he and his siblings created to hide millions of dollars in gifts from their parents.

There were also millions of dollars in improper tax deductions and Trump helped further reduce his parents’ tax bill by undervaluing their real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, according to the Times.

The newspaper said Trump’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, who died respectively in 1999 and 2000, transferred more than US$1 billion in wealth to their five children.

This could have produced a tax bill of at least US$ 550 million but the Trumps paid a total of just US$ 52.2 million, the Times said, citing tax records.

One of Trump’s lawyers, Charles Harder, decried the newspaper’s allegations as “100 per cent false, and highly defamatory.”

“There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate,” he added.

“President Trump had virtually no involvement whatsoever with these matters.”

Harder insisted the matter was mostly handled by other relatives who relied ‘entirely’ upon licensed professionals to “ensure full compliance with the law.” — AFP